March 19, 1983

Chicago officials of the Environmental Protection Agency said today that they had been ordered to change a report on dioxin contamination to comply with demands made by the Dow Chemical Company. They said the changes were ordered by their superiors in Washington and included the deletion of a sentence saying the agency had concluded: ''Dow's discharge represented the major source, if not the only source of TCDD contamination found in the Tittabawassee and Saginaw Rivers and Saginaw Bay in Michigan.'' TCDD is one form of dioxin, which is believed to be the most toxic chemical made by man. Speculation on Nominees The regional officials testified before a House subcommittee in the latest development in the three-month furor over the Environmental Protection Agency.

The stream of illegal aliens pouring into the United States has become a torrent, driven by the currency crisis that has shattered the Mexican economy. The Border Patrol is inundated, and the 2,000-mile border has turned into something more like a series of commuter stations than an international boundary. So far this year, the number of deportable aliens captured and returned to Mexico is up almost 50 percent from last year, and what the patrol calls the spring deluge is yet to come. Peso devaluations in 1982 have sharply reduced Mexicans' buying power at home and made dollars more valuable there. The Daily Thousands Each day, thousands of Mexican men, women and children wade in full view across the skimpy Rio Grande or walk across the dusty plains and sandy desert hills to the American side. Perhaps one in three will be apprehended by the thin line of Border Patrol officers and bused back, but they will try again in a matter of hours.

Amid the burned-out tenements and empty lots of the South Bronx, two single-family, ranch-style houses, complete with cathedral ceilings and aluminum siding have been erected. s The houses, looking as if they had been plucked from suburbia, are part of a city-supported effort to retain middle-class residents in the neighborhood, The suburban look, which will include white picket fences, is not unplanned. The developers said they wanted the project, which will have 90 houses and is known as Charlotte Gardens, to resemble the suburbs that have for so long tempted people to leave the South Bronx. ''The suburban look is helpful,'' said Edward J. Logue, the president of the South Bronx Development Organization, the city agency responsible for the project. ''Where did you think people went when they got enough money to leave the South Bronx? To the suburbs.''

Governor Cuomo and legislative leaders announced a general agreement tonight on a state budget for the new fiscal year that sharply reduces the need for layoffs and restores many programs favored by the State Legislature. ''This budget, when passed, should be a sound, responsible, careful document that wins us a great deal of credibility,'' Governor Cuomo said in a news conference in the Red Room of the Capitol, ''especially since it is the product of all the legislative leadership working with the Governor.'' Together for Announcement At his side were the Assembly Speaker, Stanley Fink, Democrat of Brooklyn; the Senate majority leader, Warren M. Anderson, Republican of Binghamton; the Assembly minority leader, Clarence D. Rappleyea Jr., Republican of Norwich, and the Senate minority leader, Manfred Ohrenstein, Democrat of Manhattan. The budget, agreed upon after weeks of negotiation, provides for more than $900 million in new and expanded taxes proposed by Governor Cuomo, but does not contain a key measure - an expansion of the sales tax to include movie and theater tickets, haircuts, dry cleaning and other services.

A Federal judge ruled yesterday that the City University of New York had discriminated unlawfully against women on its teaching staff for 15 years by paying them less than men in equivalent positions. Back pay and damages for thousands of women could run into millions of dollars. The decision, by Judge Lee P. Gagliardi of United States District Court in Manhattan, was based largely on a statistical examination of salaries. It came in a class-action suit filed in 1973 by 25 women employed at most of the university's 17 senior and community colleges.