Washington Star/Evening Star

CALCUTTA.—The teeming camps of refugees from East Pakistan began three miles outside Calcutta. The first camp, Sector One, sprang up on the privately owned site of a planned city.
Of the original campers, 8,000 remain—squatters huddling in half-finished houses, sleeping under stacks of cut lumber or peering from the shelter of 5-foot wide cement construction pipes.
When builders complained about the people-clogged site, the refugees were officially moved to Sector Five, two miles up the road.

CAN'T FACE ANOTHER MOVE

But these squatters still holding out in Sector One cannot face another uprooting, even for so short a distance. They sprawl weakly inside the pipes or lie motionless, as if flung on the ground.
Here and there a gaunt woman suckles a skeleton of a child, a girl cooks rice over a makeshift brazier of coals.
To move them, the Indian government is cutting off their refugee ration cards of 400 grams (14 ounces) of rice and 100 grams of dal (lentils) daily.
International relief teams provide powdered milk and bread as well.

SICK AS WELL AS HUNGRY

At the emergency dispensary supported by the Swiss Touring Club, the Pakistani doctor, a refugee himself, treated more than 100 persons before noon. Most suffer from the gastrointestinal infections rife in the camps. All suffer from malnutrition.
The bodies of those dead of starvation or disease are visible in the distance.
At Sector Five camp the silence is frightening. About 150,000 persons walk silently and singly up and down the rutted paths from ration line to cookstove to water source.
They do not go in pairs or chatter. Here a file of people waits silently for rice, another line waits wordlessly for milk.
Even the babies do not laugh or play. They are too listless.
Calcutta with its hordes of importing beggars is only 5 miles away.
At the camps, the people look back at strangers who look at them with no animosity, no special interest. There is no attempt made to beg by these penniless, hungry people who without India would face starvation.
As the car drove out of Sector Five, we passed fields stretching to the left of the road dotted with people as far in the distance as the eye could see.
They squatted, each several feet from the nearest man or woman, or walked back to the road alone.
It took a moment for the smell and the reality to reach me. This was their latrine, a vast field of solitary, silent figures stretching into the horizon.
At the exit the car stopped. A flat tire. While we waited, I unfolded the newly printed map of Bangla Desh on sale in the town. It bore the red and green flag with Bangla Desh outlined in white.
A crowd gathered. They had not known this was printed and their delight was touching. I saw how much it meant and offered it to them.
The response was "No, lady. It is yours. We are glad just to see it. Now we have a map and a flag. All we need is recognition."