ON THE EAST PAKISTAN BORDER.-Emaciated, silent, cheerless, the East Pakistani refugee children who have poured into India to escape war are a heartrending sight.

Together with their mothers, many of them with babies in their arms, they huddle in temporary shelters uncertain as to their future.

As Pakistani government troops spread along the Indian border to contain the East Pakistani secessionist revolt, she flow of refugees into the Indian states of Tripura Assam, and West Bengal continues.

It is estimated that there now are three million refugees from East Pakistan in India.

POPULATION SURGE

Tripura's population, which was 1.5 million two months ago has increased by almost half as much.

There are more than a half million registered refugees in Tripura, and perhaps at least 100,000 are unregistered and living with relatives and friends.

The situation has led to a serious problem in food supply and has adversely affected the development projects in this Indian Union Territory.

But if the children depress, their grown up brothers in the Mukti Fauj (Liberation Front) see no need for despondency.

Somewhere on the border some miles from Agartala, the capital of Tripura State, on the fringe of a forest, I spent an hour at a training camp of the Mukti Fauj.

Past the armed guard in lungi (a piece of colored striped cloth worn below the waist) and shirt, I was led to an old wooden house. There I was met by a young boy who looked hardly 18, who introduced himself as the commander. He is a former cadet of the military academy in Dacca.

He introduced me to some of his fellow fighters, all of student age and wearing lungis and shirts.

As I sketched one of them who sat guarding a stack of rifles, the commander talked to me about the daily exploits of his boys, about their regular encounters with Pakistani troops. He was confident of victory. The morale of the boys is very high, he said repeatedly.

When I had finished the drawing, he came over and had a look. "Don't show him afraid," the commander said. "You must put some courage in his eyes. Our morale is very high."

LESS OPTIMISM VOICED

The situation on the refugee front is a lot less optimistic.

About half the refugees, it is estimated, have been provided with temporary shelter.

Many schools and some temples have been turned into camps, but thousands live in huts made of pleated bamboo screens and grass thatching.

The jungles of Tripura have plenty of bamboo groves and the screens are made by hundreds of refugees working at various construction camps.

The huts look pretty and neat, but they can be blown over in a storm. They will be poor protection when the heavy rains begin in June. Moreover, thousands of families now live in the open, under trees.

PITIFUL SCENE

The condition of the refugees is far worse in West Bengal than in Tripura Because of the heavier local population, the congestion is more evident; besides, the weather in West Bengal is hotter and more humid.

Bangaon, about 60 miles from Calcutta and two miles within the Indian side of the border, presents a sad spectacle, with thousands of mothers with little children and babies in arms living along the roadside cooking food or resting in the shade.

Despair is written on their faces. Long columns of people were waiting at different places for their ration of 400 grams of rice per day.

At Sabrum, 70 miles south of Agartala, is one of the biggest camps in Tripura. A town with a normal population of 2,000 now has several times that number. Eighty-thousand people have passed through Sabrum in the last month.

A few hundred yards away from the camp, the Fenny River flows, marking the bound-ary with East Bengal. A tapering, hooded Bengali boat lay moored on the Indian bank. A group of children were peering across to the other side. "There!" said one in a hushed voice. "There they go." Two Pakistani officers were marching in step in the compound of what was once a post office, now turned into an army camp.

BATTERED, DESERTED TOWN

This is the town of Ramgarh. There was not another soul in sight. Beyond the post office were wide open spaces. Next to it, a partly damaged school building and a half- destroyed mosque. Nearby were the charred remains of a few houses, a clump of burnt-out banana trees, and a couple of badly damaged coconut trees.

Back at the Circuit House in Agartala my bedroom windows rattled every night as Pakistani shells burst along the border. The shelling goes on during the day as well, though with less regularity. It is probably aimed at the guerrilla forces operating from the border, but it is also, no doubt, a way of intimidating the villagers in these areas and forcing them to leave.