Relief and rehabilitation:

The government of India was successful in providing relief and in resettlement and rehabilitation of nearly six million refugees from Pakistan.

♤ A department of rehabilitation was created.

♤ Various refugee camps were set up some notable being camp at Kurukshetra and Kolwada

camp at Bombay.

♤ Many of the Hindus and Sikhs fleeing West Punjab were directed by the government of India to refugee camp in Kurukshetra. A vast city of tents had grown up on the plain, to house waves of migrants, sometimes up to 20,000 a day.

♤ Kurukshetra was the largest of the nearly 200 camps set up to house refugees from West Punjab. While there were five refugee camps in Mumbai for refugees from Sindh region.

Some refugees had arrived before the date of transfer of power; among them prescient businessmen who had sold their properties in advance and migrated with the proceeds. However, the vast majority came after15 August 1947, and with little more than the clothes on their skin. These were the farmers who had ‘stayed behind till the last moment, firmly resolved to remain in Pakistan if they could be assured of an honourable living’. But when, in September and October, the violence escalated in the Punjab, they had to abandon that idea. The Hindus and Sikhs who were lucky enough to escape the mobs fled to India by road, rail, sea and on foot.

Camps such as Kurukshetra were but a holding operation. The refugees had to be found permanent homes and productive work. Thus refugees required land for permanent settlement. As it happened, a massive migration had also taken place the other way, into Pakistan from India. Thus, the first place to resettle the refugees was on land vacated by Muslims in the eastern part of the Punjab. If the transfer of populations had been ‘the greatest mass migration’ in history now commenced ‘the biggest land resettlement operation in the world’.

♤ As against 2.7 million hectares abandoned by Hindus and Sikhs in West Punjab, there were only 1.9 million hectares left behind by Muslims in East Punjab.

♤ The shortfall was made more acute by the fact that the areas in the west of the province had richer soils, and were more abundantly irrigated.

To begin with, each family of refugee farmers was given an allotment of four hectares, regardless of its holding in Pakistan. Loans were advanced to buy seed and equipment. While cultivation commenced on these temporary plots, applications were invited for permanent allotments.

Each family was asked to submit evidence of how much land it had left behind. Applications were received from 10 March 1948; within a month, more than half a million claims had been filed. These claims were then verified in open assemblies consisting of other migrants from the same village. As each claim was read out by a government official, the assembly approved, amended, or rejected it.

Expectedly, many refugees were at first prone to exaggeration. However, every false claim was punished, sometimes by a reduction in the land allotted, in extreme cases by a brief spell of imprisonment. This acted as a deterrent; still, an officer closely associated with the process estimated that there was an overall inflation of about 25 per cent. To collect, collate, verify and act upon the claims a Rehabilitation Secretariat was set up in Jullundur. At its peak there were about 7,000 officials working there; they came to constitute a kind of refugee city of their own.

Leading the operations was the director general of rehabilitation, Sardar Tarlok Singh of the Indian Civil Service. A graduate of the London School of Economics, Tarlok Singh used his

academic training to good effect, making two innovations that proved critical in the successful settlement of the refugees.

Thus the task of rehabilitation took time to accomplish and by 1951, the problem of the rehabilitation of the refugees from West Pakistan had been fully tackled.

The rehabilitation on East took years and it was more difficult because of constant exodus of Hindus from East Bengal continued for years.