Cyclone Yaas: At review meeting, PM asks for timely evacuation of people from high-risk areas

Mayurbhanj, Bhadrak and Balasore districts in Odisha are likely to be worst affected by the cyclonic storm, India Meteorological Department officials said.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Sunday held a meeting to review the preparedness for Cyclone Yaas, which will make landfall on India's eastern coast on May 26. The cyclone is expected to hit the land between Sundarbans in West Bengal and north Odisha.

PM Modi holding the virtual review meeting on Sunday.(ANI Photo)

Union home minister Amit Shah along with senior government officials and representatives from National Disaster Management Authority (NDMA), secretaries from ministries of telecom, power, civil aviation and earth sciences attended the virtual meeting.

At the meeting, the Prime Minister directed senior officers to work in close coordination with states to ensure the safe evacuation of people from high-risk areas and timely evacuation of those involved in off-shore activities.

He also spoke about the need to ensure that time duration of outages of power supply and communication network are minimum, and if there is an outage, it is restored swiftly. PM Modi further directed officials that advisories and instructions on dos and dont's about the cyclone be made available in easy to understand and local language to residents of the affected districts.

With Odisha and West Bengal bracing for cyclonic storm Yaas, the Indian Army on Saturday informed that it has arranged columns and engineer task forces are on standby for rescue and relief operations.

West Bengal chief minister Mamata Banerjee and Odisha chief minister Naveen Patnaik had earlier reviewed the preparedness for the cyclonic storm in high-level meetings with officials in their respective states on Saturday.

Mayurbhanj, Bhadrak and Balasore districts are likely to be worst affected by the cyclonic storm, Umashankar Das, Deputy Director of India Meteorological Department (IMD) in Bhubaneswar said on Sunday.

"We are expecting that the well-marked low-pressure area over the east-central Bay of Bengal will concentrate into a depression during next 12 hours and by tomorrow (May 24), it is going to be a cyclonic storm and will continue to move in the north north-westward direction and on May 26 it will reach Odisha, West Bengal, and Bangladesh coast," Das was quoted as saying by news agency ANI.

The head of Regional Meteorological Centre (RMC) in Kolkata Dr Sanjib Bandyopadhyay had earlier advised the fishermen of West Bengal not to venture into the sea from May 23 evening, and advised those who are in the deep sea to return to the coast by May 23 morning, in view of Cyclone Yaas.

Yaas will intensify as it heads towards northwards, and will make the landfall as very severe cyclonic storm, the IMD has said.