Washington Star/Evening Star

KRISHNAGAR, INDIA.—India's West Bengal State is short of police because so many are guarding the rivers to keep the bodies of cholera victims from being thrown in.
According to conservative official estimates, the week-old epidemic among refugees front East Pakistan has taken at least 4,000 lives, half in the Nadia district surrounding Krishnagar.
The 200,000 residents of Krishnagar, 60 miles northeast of Calcutta, are tense.
Rumors spread daily that Pakistani agents from across the border 20 miles away are emptying bottles of cholera germs into the local water supplies to make the epidemic spread faster.

Moslem fatally beaten

A crowd of 500 persons beat a Moslem to death yesterday at the Krishnagar railway station after a report that he had emptied a small bottle into a roadside well.
D. K. Ghosh, the district magistrate of Krishnagar, said the rivers are being polluted hut by the bodies of cholera victims thrown in by relatives for quick burial.
He said that so many police were now deployed to guard the rivers against this that there is a shortage of police to enforce law and order. With the state's population increased by at least 4 1/2 million refugees from East Pakistan and with hundreds of thousands more coming across the frontiers each week, the West Bengal government asked other states to lend it at least 20 battalions of police.

Normally cremated

Most of the cholera victims have been Hindus, who normally are cremated. But a shortage of firewood and fuel makes the traditional rituals impossible.
The district magistrate said he had ordered mass burial for at least 1,600 persons. Hindus and Moslems have been buried together in three mass graves in the Nadia district.
The biggest is at Badadurpur, in a government forest seven miles from Krishnagar, where 511 bodies have been buried in a pit.
Ghosh estimated that by last Sunday, 1,079 persons had died of cholera in hospitals in the Nadia district and an equal number had perished along the roads and in villages.
About 75 new victims are admitted to hospitals each day, but with 4,800 cholera patients already under treatment, there is a shortage of hospital space.

Cholera ward flooded

At one Krishnagar hospital, a special cholera ward was built of tarpaulin and bamboo outside the main building. When the afternoon monsoon rains came yesterday, all the beds were flooded.
There also is a shortage of saline water—cholera cases need at least eight quarts a day for three days—and of cholera vaccine.
Ghosh said he needs more medical personnel as well, that about 1,000 government employees are caring for approximately 500,000 refugees in the district.
"Normal administrative work in the entire district has been collapsing," he added. "More than 1,000 officials working round the clock attending to refugees get no time to do office work."
The inoculation drive got a boost yesterday with the arrival of two jet inoculation guns sent from London by the Oxfam Group. Each can give 700 inoculations an hour.