The Chief Minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee was informed on Thursday that due to the Amphan cyclone 86 people had been killed in the state. Among them 19 people died in Kolkata, 21 in North 24 Parganas, eleven people were killed in East Medinipur and two in Hooghly, 18 in North 24 Parganas, 7 in Howrah as per the details provided to her.
On Wednesday night, cyclone Amphan caused devastating destruction across half a dozen districts of West Bengal including the state capital Kolkata and left Lakhs of people rendered homeless and blown away shanties, uprooted thousands of trees and swamped low-lying areas.
Despite that electricity and mobile services were restored in some parts of the state capital and North and South 24 Parganas, the two worst-hit districts, large areas of the city continued to remain without power as electric poles and communication lines had been blown away by gusting winds.
On Thursday, Mamata Banerjee had announced a compensation of Rs 2 lakh each for the families of the perished, and for preliminary restoration work she has announced a corpus fund of Rs 1,000 crore in the affected areas.
Redemption work has been done by working on a war-raged by unclogging the roads that were blocked due to fallen trees by the Teams of the NDRF and the State Disaster Relief Force (SDRF).
It was a ghastly sight where hundreds of houses were destroyed, villages were swimming in misery, rivers overran the villages and farmlands throughout the Sundarbans acres of standing crop has been damaged.
According to an official, more than 1 lakh hectares each of vegetable and sesame crops including 88,000 hectares of paddy have been lost Statewide.
Mamata Banerjee has asked the central government to declare the cyclone Amphan as a national disaster. She has also asked the Prime Minister to visit the state and do a self-assessment of the destruction caused by the cyclone Amphan.
On Friday, on her urging, Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited West Bengal. After reviewing the situation through an aerial survey in Basirhat in North 24 Parganas district with Mamata Banerjee and Governor Jagdeep Dhankhar, the PM announced advanced interim assistance of Rs 1,000 crore for cyclone and Besides that PM Modi has also announced an ex- gratia to the families of each of those deceased of Rs 2 lakh during the catastrophes caused by the cyclone and Rs 50,000 for the injured.
It is believed that it was more extensive than what cyclone Aila had caused 11 years ago
