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Several thousand people have been left homeless after the most powerful cyclone in more than a decade hit India and Bangladesh this week, as Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi visited the area on Friday and pledged aid.

Cyclone Amphan killed at least 96 people, officials said, after it swept in from the Bay of Bengal on Wednesday. Eighty fatalities were in the eastern Indian state of West Bengal and 16 were in neighbouring Bangladesh, after winds of up to 185 km per hour caused flooding, blew away roofs, uprooted trees and ripped up power lines……

The total death toll is expected to rise as communications are restored and authorities reach villages cut off by blocked roads, particularly in India’s low-lying Sundarbans delta, home to four million people and thick mangrove forests that are a critical tiger habitat.

In the Sundarbans’ Gosaba, an administrative area of the river delta that juts into the sea, the storm completely destroyed around 26,000 homes and damaged another 14,000, local disaster management official Pradip Kumar Dalui said.

The cyclone also damaged some 19 kilometres of embankments around Gosaba, causing 13 breaches that led salty water to inundate swathes of land,  Prime Minister Modi  said. …. https://www.sbs.com.au/news/cyclone-amphan-leaves-thousands-homeless-in-eastern-india-as-pm-narendra-modi-offers-help