NEW DELHI, June 3—Indian officials reported today that at least 2,000 refugees from East Pakistan had died of cholera in an epidemic that has been raging for a week in their teeming border camps.

Unofficial figures put the toll much higher among the Bengali refugees more than four million of whom have fled to India to escape the Pakistani Army, which since March 25 has been trying to crush the Bengali independence movement in East Pakistan.

Government officials have acknowledged that accurate death figures were impossible to keep under such chaotic conditions. They described the situation as “a grave crisis” and “absolutely impossible.”

Speaking of the loll, K. K. Das, the Minister of Health, said that the epidemic was just beginning and that the deaths could easily increase to 40,000 or 50,000 in a matter of days.

Mr. Das, in an interview in his office, expressed alarm that large numbers of refugees, in panic and because of over crowded conditions in border camps, were drifting closer to Calcutta.

“God knows what would happen if the epidemic spread to Calcutta,” he said.

Calcutta, an overcrowded city of eight million people, is al ready India's worst cholera center—suffering from a shortage of drinking water and a sewage system that frequently consists of little more than stagnant open ditches.

Panic in Border Towns

Officials of West Bengal state, of which Calcutta is the capital, said tonight that about 50,000 Bengali refugees had al ready entered the city.

Most of the refugees and most of the cholera cases are in West Bengal state—a politically unstable, violence‐prone area where social tensions are already high and have been aggravated by the influx of refugees.

The cholera has already spread panic in some of the Indian border towns. Many residents have fled to Calcutta and other areas in the interior. Many shops have been closed. Some frightened relief workers have also fled.

Nadia district, about 60 miles north of Calcutta, has been particularly hard hit. So far, more than a million refugees have poured into this district, whose normal population is about 500,000.

Witnesses report that at least 2,000 refugees have died of cholera in Nadia alone in the last four days—and that 2,000 others lie dying in hospitals and by the roadside.

Some of the dead are being buried in mass graves, the re ports say, but other bodies are lying in the open.

Many of the refugees are Hindus, whose religion requires them to cremate their dead. But the refugees cannot afford to buy the wood for the funeral pyre, so many have simply been gathering small bundles of sticks, burning them under the bodies of their dead and then leaving the slightly charred bodies by the side of the road.

The Moslems among the refugees are trying to bury their dead, but some bodies lie in very shallow graves.

Indian medical officials say that most victims already had the disease when they entered India, although they concede that conditions in the refugee camps—with their inadequate sanitary and medical facilities —are conducive to the spread of the epidemic.

East Pakistan is a virulent cholera area; in an average year as many as 150,000 Bengalis die of the disease. In India, on the other hand, cholera has been largely controlled and about 6,000 cholera deaths were reported last year.

The Indian Government is doing its best to cope with the refugees—virtually every official along India's 1,350‐mile border with East Pakistan has been assigned to relief work.

Tens of Thousands Daily

The influx would be too much for even a wealthy country to handle. Tens of thousands of refugees pour into India daily.

No one can predict when the epidemic will spend itself. A normal cholera epidemic reaches its peak at the end of about 15 days and then subsides. How ever, that pattern usually holds good only for a fixed population in a fixed area.

Indian officials say that what they need is not medical personnel but equipment for field hospitals and medical supplies.

The international community —slow at first to react to the refugee crisis—has now pledged considerable relief, but little of it has yet arrived.