India Sending Food, Medicine to Soviet Union

India, which has difficulty feeding and caring for its own millions, Friday joined the growing list of nations sending relief aid to the Soviet Union.

The official Tass news agency said a special Indian air force flight carrying 24 tons of medicine and food landed at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport in what will be the first of a series of aid flights.

At least 24 nations, including Israel and Sri Lanka, have sent help to the Soviet Union in a relief effort that is snowballing.

“Every day brings news of the arrival of aid supplies, and we decide in advance where they are needed most of all,” Deputy Health Minister Alexander Tsarengorodtsev told Tass.

“The Soviet Union has received more than 17,000 tons of medicines, medical equipment and food,” Tsarengorodtsev said, adding that “the country is facing an acute shortage of medicines and medical specialists.”

Tass said the first Indian aid flight contained rice, canned vegetables, milk powder and jam.

The shipment will be sent to Tula, an ancient Russian city near Moscow where the Yasnaya Polyana estate of the great writer Leo Tolstoy is located, Tass said.

Tass said that India will send aircraft with relief supplies to different parts of the Soviet Union throughout January.

It added that Indian Ambassador H. E. Gonsalves had presented the chairman of the Supreme Soviet, Anatoly Lukyanov, with a check on Dec. 13 for an equivalent of $16 million to purchase medicines, medical equipment and assistance from India.

At the time, Gonsalves said that India would provide 1 million tons of wheat to the Soviet Union on special terms and a grant of 20,000 tons of rice.

India is one of the world’s major recipients of foreign aid and has difficulty in managing to feed its own population of 833 million.

Tsarengorodtsev said that this week alone relief help came by aircraft and trucks from Austria, Germany, France, the United States, Switzerland, Britain, Belgium, Japan and Sri Lanka.

The German government and private donors are providing emergency food aid worth $530 million to ease food shortages in the Soviet Union this winter.

In a separate relief effort, UNESCO recently sent more than 30 tons of food, medicine, clothes, toys, footwear and schoolbooks for the young victims of the Chernobyl nuclear accident in April, 1986, Tass reported.