Nearly 800,000 people in eastern India have been evacuated from the expected path of a major cyclone packing winds up to 200 kilometres per hour and torrential rains, officials said on Thursday.
The Indian weather service said Extremely Severe Cyclonic Storm Fani was expected to make landfall on Friday afternoon in Odisha state and barrel northeastwards on a pathway close to the homes of more than 100 million people.
A state relief department official told AFP that 780,000 people were moved to safer places overnight from at least 13 districts of Odisha, home to some 46 million people, which will bear the brunt of the weather system.
“We are expecting more than a million people to move out of the danger zone in next 12 hours,” Bishnupada Sethi, Odisha Special Relief Commissioner, told AFP.
Some 3,000 shelters in schools and government buildings have been set up to accommodate more than a million people.
On Thursday the storm, which reports said was the biggest to hit eastern India in nearly two decades, was brewing in the Bay of Bengal some 250 kilometres offshore and moving slowly but ominously westwards.