CALCUTTA, INDIA. - Two thousand ragged Bengali refugees are stacked on a 12-car train meant to hold fewer than a thousand. Five thousand more lie on the station platform, waiting their turn--even though the next train is not due to leave for 24 hours.

Some are dying as they wait - of pneumonia, malnutrition, dysentery, cholera. All are worried and frightened about their destination, in central India. They would rather stay here, closer to the homes in East Pakistan they were forced to abandon.

But desperate Indian officials have stopped their rations - knowing this is the only way to induce them to leave the impossibly choked border areas and relocate elsewhere in India. With government rations cut off, the refugees have Jammed the railway station, clamoring for a place on the daily train .

To keep alive in the meantime, the refugees have sold nearly everything they carried out with them - umbrellas, pots, pieces of clothing - to buy food.

THE POPULATION DOUBLES

The scene is Barasat, a market town in India's West Bengal state 16 miles northeast of Calcutta and about 30 miles from the East Pakistani border. It once had a population of 40,000. Now it has been swamped by 40,000 of the Bengali refugees fleeing the Pakistani Army's campaign against the independence movement in East Pakistan .

Barasat is a microcosm of the Indian border areas, which have been overwhelmed by nearly six million of the sick and hungry refugees .

So far, the Government has been able to move only about 30,000 of them, nearly all by train to a Government transit camp at Mana 600 miles away in Madhya Pradesh. A two-plane Soviet airlift went into operation yesterday, carrying up to 700 refugees a day to Mana. An American airlift of four transport planes, due to start tomorrow, is expected to take about 1,000 a day from Tripura, east of East Pakistan, to Assam in India's northeast .

REFUGEES STILL POUR IN

But at this rate. the transfer of refugees will not come close to keeping up with the influx from East Pakistan, still ill the tells of thousands daily, In Barasat, for example, for a time 5,000 new refugees were streaming into the town every day, and only 2,000 were leaving by train. Local officials have refused to register any more refugees and have sent them on to the next district.

Barasat today is more of a swarm than a town. Refugees are so thick in the streets that cars can only inch through. Refugees overflow every doorstep, porch and empty building. They fill the fields. They build their tiny cooking fires everywhere. They build flimsy thatch lean-tos, and rainstorms rip them apart. The meld and garbage seem to spread around them as the monsoon rains grow heavier.

The local people have been sympathetic, but with the refugees disrupting all normal life, the strains are growing. Last week, Hindu refugees took shelter in Moslem mosques to escape a monsoon downpour, and extra policemen had to be called in to avert religious rioting--the Government's greatest fear in all the border states.

NO SOLUTION AT THIS END

"Unless there's some political solution in East Pakistan," said Taraknath Bhattacharya, the 35-year-old district administrator 'there call be no solution at this end."

As miserable as conditions in the town are, the railway station is worse. The 5,000 refugees lying pressed against each other on the damp concrete floor of the platform look, in the dim light of the overhead bulbs, like an eerie blanket of the dead. But then the mass stirs. An arm or a leg moves, someone vomits, someone moans. A baby wails.

An old man lies writhing on his back on the floor, delirious, dying. Emaciated, fly-covered infants thrash and roll away from the family huddle and begin crying and coughing, but their parents - even if they wake up - are too weak and dazed from their trek out of East Pakistan to help or comfort them .

Many are too weak to get up even when they have to relieve themselves. The occasional faint breeze carries an overpowering smell.

There is no doctor or nurse or first-aid attendant at the station

A dazed man sits cross-legged in front of a small metal box that holds all he owns. Over and over again, he fingers and examines each tattered document, each threadbare scrap of clothing.

In sickness, modesty is forgotten. Women sleep naked from the waist up.

The stationmaster tells a visitor that all the railway stations from the border to Calcutta look like this one. He says there are four or five deaths a day from cholera alone on the platform.

The refugees boarded the train at 5 o'clock in the afternoon; it did not leave until 40 minutes after midnight.

Inside the air was stifling, the occupants packed together. The trip to Mana, according to the schedule, takes 22 hours, but it actually takes much longer because of stops and delays.

To escape the crush inside the cars as they waited, some passengers came out on the platform for air only slightly less fetid.

Anxious and troubled about where they are going, they looked for someone to answer their questions - "Will we get food in Mana?" "Do they know we are coming?" There were only a couple of railway officials on the platform and their answers were vague .

As these passengers paced the platform, they talked with a visitor about burning, looting and killing that had driven them from their homes. They were Hindus from Khulna and Barisal and Faridpur districts in East Pakistan.

"If the truth prevails in the world, then we believe we will win our independence," Ashutosh Biswas, a 21-year- old storekeeper, said. He pondered for a few seconds, then added: "We adults are ready to suffer, but our children are being killed. How can we get back those lives?"