KOLKATA/DHAKA: Cyclone Aila has displaced millions of people in India and Bangladesh, only a fraction of whom has access to food and drinking water, officials said yesterday.
Nearly 2.3 million people have been displaced and tens of thousands have moved to government shelters in West Bengal, the aid agency Save the Children told AlertNet.
Emergency teams raced to rescue cyclone survivors in the remote southwest of Bangladesh yesterday. The cyclone has killed at least 210 people in the flood-prone region, though officials said the death toll could rise, and rescuers have struggled to reach millions still marooned.
Military and civil relief workers struggled to deliver food, fresh water and shelters to regions worst affected by the surge of seawater and destructive high winds, authorities in Dhaka said.
Bangladesh’s Disaster Management Minister Abdur Razzak said conditions on the ground were desperate but that a major relief and rescue operation was in full swing.
“We have adequate resources to ensure food, relief and rehabilitation, and we’ll work for as long as it takes to reach those affected,” Razzak said.
Aila hit parts of coastal Bangladesh and eastern India on Monday, triggering tidal surges and floods.
Officials say more than one million people have been displaced in Sundarban Islands in West Bengal state alone, one of the world’s biggest tiger reserves and which is already threatened by global warming.
The storm caused havoc in the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest and home to about 650 endangered Bengal tigers. Conservationists have launched a search to assess whether any of the animals may have been killed when the cyclone tore through the forest, which straddles India and Bangladesh.
Heavy rain triggered by the storm raised river levels and burst mud embankments in the Sundarbans delta, destroying hundreds of thousands of houses and causing widespread flooding in the eastern state, and triggered landslides.
Global warming experts say rising sea levels have seen the fragile Sundarbans lose 28 percent of its habitat in the last 40 years.
“There is water everywhere. We could reach aid to only 10 percent of the affected population. We could not even airdrop food packets because of the flooding,” Kanti Ganguly, West Bengal state minister for Sundarbans, told Reuters.
At least 135 people have died in Bangladesh and 75 in West Bengal, and hundreds are still missing, according to officials. In Sundarbans there were fears for the fate of the more than 250 tigers in the reserve.
In Bangladesh, Aila destroyed tens of thousands of acres of crops. As water levels slowly recede, hundreds of thousands of families who sought refuge in shelters, schools and other buildings are now returning to find their homes either washed away or submerged in water.
In West Bengal, the cyclone hit the state capital of Kolkata, bringing down trees and electricity pylons and smashing cars. About 20 of those killed died a day after the storm in mudslides caused by rainfall in the hill resort of Darjeeling, the state’s chief secretary Asoke Mohon Chakraborty said.
“The cyclone traveled through northern districts of the state and heavy downpours triggered over 40 landslides on Tuesday,” he said. Chakraborty said he expected further fatalities to be reported as relief workers reached outlying villages.
