Only a few days ago the number of East Pakistani refugees in India was put at 5,000,000. Now it has risen to 6,000,000-a figure so huge that it beggars the imagination.

No wonder Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi cries out to the world for more help in coping with this human tidal wave. She told her parliament: "No other country has ever had to face an influx of such magnitude. No country in the world has had to face even one-tenth of the situation before." And poignantly she added: "They have come to a country which is Itself one of the poorest in the world."

Unhappily it is a fact that the world community as a whole has been slow in responding to the refugees' plight.

True, magnificent efforts have been made by private relief organizations United Nations specialized agencies are getting into operation. Britain has made a virtually open-ended relief commitment. The United States has pledged $17 million in aid, and other countries have made generous gestures. But it is only in recent days that international aid has begun to arrive on a scale sufficient to make any Impact, and even then it falls far short of the massive, overall needs.

Once more the acuteness of the human problem points up the necessity for a centralized international agency to coordinate relief in the event of an emergency of such dimensions and to see that the aid is channeled in swiftly and used to the best advantage.

Last year, after a series of natural disasters-the earthquakes in Peru and Turkey and the cyclone in East Pakistan-Turkey and other countries sponsored a move to get such an agency established under UN auspices. Their proposal was endorsed by the UN General Assembly last December. Now Secretary-General U Thant has gone a stage further and prepared a comprehensive plan for a UN disaster relief center.

The plan will be submitted to next month's meeting in Geneva of the UN Economic and Social Council and hopefully It will be acted on by the General Assembly in the fall. Under it relief supplies would be stockpiled at various locations around the world ready to be drawn upon when needed.

The relief center would be intended to deal with man- made disasters, whereas the refugee drama in Bengal is the result of a political disaster. But surely the agency's pro-visions could apply to this kind of an emergency too where the human need is so great.