NEW DELHI, July 20, Reuter - Cholera has killed 84 people in the Indian capital so far this month and doctors warned on Wednesday that a properly coordinated campaign of innoculation and education was needed to prevent more deaths.

Health officials in New Delhi said monsoon rains sweeping north India have brought cases of the water-borne disease to 205 since July 1. This compares with 286 cases in all of 1987.

City health authorities have launched an innoculation campaign in the slums of east Delhi, where most of the cases are concentrated, but doctors say this is nt enough.

"In the end, it all comes down to water supply. It is no use filling people with injections if they go on drinking contaminated water from shallow hand-pumps," said K. Agarwal, medical superintendant of a hospital in the worst-hit area.

There is no mains water supply in the slums and city authorities are providing tankers full of drinking water.

"We know we shouldn't drink from the pumps, but there is never enough water in the tankers. What are we to do?" asked a young mother in rundown Sundar Nagri district.

Two doctors working beneath a tree manage to perform 500 innoculations a day in one slum area as part of the campaign against cholera, which causes diarrhoea and vomitting.

"It is mostly the kids that we do," said Dr. A.N. Sethi, surveying the bedraggled crowd squeezed around his makeshift surgery while a local resident scooped slops from an open drain three meters (yards) away.

Vineeta Rai, New Delhi's director of health services, said the innoculation drive was to be stepped up, with more hygienic jet-guns, which pump out 250 vaccinations an hour, being used.

"Ah yes, jet-guns. They sound marvellous, but we have never actually seen one," said hospital chief Agarwal.

Health officials said the current wave of deaths from cholera was confined to communities where poverty made people vulnerable, and did not constitute an epidemic.

"Cholera has surfaced in colonies in east Delhi where unauthorised water supplies aggravate the situation and people are not in any case in the best of health," said Rai.

"We are focussing on those areas, and believe we can contain the problem," she said.

"An epidemic? It's an academic question. The fact is there is a significant number of people dying out there," said a World Health Organisation official.

Better coordination is vital if the outbreak is not to run rampant, doctors say.

"We need to immunise, that is for the health department," said a weary doctor at an east Delhi hospital as she innoculated her 160th patient of the morning.

"We need clean water now, that is for the water department. We need a proper long-term water supply, that is for the public works department," she added.

"We need people to know about all these things, that is for the education department.

"So many departments. What we need is to work together to save lives."