Word: bengals
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...founders, who severed East Pakistan's links with West Pakistan after a violent upheaval in 1971 and established it as a separate nation, Bangladesh will always be "Golden Bengal." In reality, however, the low-lying delta country, laced and often lashed by three great river systems, is still a "basket case," the cruel epithet thrust upon it at the time of its independence. A calamitous series of floods, cyclones and war-inflicted suffering have made it a focus of international concern from its inception...
This year's floods follow a devastating inundation in 1987, and worse may be in store. The problem begins beyond Bangladesh in a 600,000-sq.-mi. watershed of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Meghna river systems. All flow through Bangladesh and empty into the Bay of Bengal. The watershed contains the southern slopes of the Himalayas in northern India, Nepal and Bhutan, where the hillsides have been ravaged by deforestation. With the denuded soil no longer able to absorb monsoon rains, the savage runoff increases year by year in speed and volume, bringing with it ever larger loads of silt...
...church has been particularly aggressive in promoting natural family planning throughout the Third World. Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity run an N.F.P. center in Calcutta in a former chemicals warehouse. The sisters have taught the method to 64,000 women in the Indian state of West Bengal. Teachers use everyday agricultural images to explain a woman's menstrual cycle: seeds are planted during the monsoon, when the soil is soft and moist; cows are inseminated when they produce mucus at the cervix, fertility's telltale sign. Some women who cannot afford pencil or paper dutifully chart their fertile days...
Snaking down from a Himalayan ice cave to the Bay of Bengal, the 1,560-mile- long river is called Ganga Ma (Mother Ganges), the holiest of all Hindu streams. Every pious Hindu wishes to be cremated on the Ganges' banks and to bequeath his ashes to her waters...
...years of relatively good government under their rule. The Communists have distributed tracts of farmland to landless peasants and kept government corruption in check. The party, which broke with Moscow in 1964, is hardly doctrinaire. Chief Minister Basu, for example, is coaxing multinational companies to invest in West Bengal...