Jobs lost due to lockdown, houses ruined by Amphan; migrant labourers look at unpredictability
‘ We need to reconstruct from scratch’
People from all walks of life– a lone guy sitting on a sinking island in the Bay of Bengal, a weatherman keeping track of the circumstance from the Regional Meteorological Centre at Alipore in Kolkata, and even Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee– explained Cyclone Amphan with the very same words: “I have never ever seen such a cyclone in my life”. There is no historical record of a cyclone with a wind speed as high as 185 km/hour making landfall on the coast of Bengal in current times. It was not just the intensity of the storm that made the event substantial but likewise its period. The wall cloud stayed for almost five to 6 hours. The only contrast that individuals of seaside Bengal and the authorities could make was with Cyclone Aila which struck in 2009, but with a speed of 120 km/hour. In anticipation of Amphan, 5 lakh people were left to cyclone shelters Of them, 3 lakh alone were from South 24 Parganas district.
But while destruction brought on by the storm has actually been huge, the variety of deaths in West Bengal has been relatively low. Banerjee said 98 individuals passed away in the cyclone, of which 19 lost their lives in Kolkata. And in some environmentally fragile places, casualties have been very low. Amphan ripped through Ghoramara, the tiniest and most vulnerable island in the Sundarbans, with a population of 5,000 residents, only declaring 2 goats. They died when a wall collapsed on them.
A few hours after the cyclone, Banerjee sat at the State Secretariat and summed up the scale and nature of the tempest through video conference. South and North 24 Parganas are “completed” and “99%of south Bengal are ruined,” she stated, looking at updates on her mobile phone. “We require to rebuild Bengal from scratch.”
Acres and acres of agricultural land in the State were flooded. Tarak Ghosh, a little farmer, pulled out wet paddy from a field which, up until a week earlier, was radiant under the sun. It was simply the beginning of the harvest of the Rabi crop. “It is all gone now,” he stated. West Bengal, the leading State in paddy production, had suffered a fantastic blow. By one price quote, about 1.5 million sharecroppers of south Bengal had actually lost their fruit and vegetables. Vegetables and cash crops like sesame, jute and fruits had sim