Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu took to the skies on Wednesday, 4 November 2026 to personally assess the scale of destruction left by Cyclone Murasu across three battered coastal districts — Guntur, Prakasam, and Bapatla — before convening an emergency review with officials at the RTG Centre in the state secretariat.

Crops Under Water, Villages Cut Off Across Six Towns

The aerial survey painted a grim picture. Agricultural fields across Chilakaluripet, Ongole, Kothapatnam, Chinaganjam, Chirala, and Bapatla lie submerged, with standing crops lost to inundation. Several villages remain marooned, cut off by floodwaters, while roads across the region have sustained significant damage. In his own words: 'Panta nīṭa munigāyi... anēka grāmālu jaladiga' — 'Crops have drowned... many villages are surrounded by water.'

The three districts bear the brunt of Andhra Pradesh's coastline vulnerability. Bapatla, carved out as a separate district only in 2022, is facing one of its first major cyclonic tests as an administrative unit. Prakasam and Guntur, meanwhile, have a long history of Bay of Bengal cyclones ripping through their farmland and fishing communities.

From the Air to the War Room: Naidu's RTG Centre Review

After completing the aerial assessment, Naidu moved directly to the RTG (Real-Time Governance) Centre at the state secretariat in Amaravati — the nerve centre for disaster coordination — and chaired a review meeting on the relief operations currently underway in the affected zones. The RTG Centre, a flagship governance tool of the Telugu Desam Party administration, allows live monitoring of field-level relief work across districts.

Andhra Pradesh institutionalised this model of aerial damage assessment followed by secretariat-level coordination in the wake of Cyclone Hudhud in 2014, which devastated the Visakhapatnam coast. That disaster accelerated the state's investment in rapid-response infrastructure, and successive governments have embedded aerial surveys and centralised war-room reviews into standard operating procedure.

Farmers, Roads, and the Compensation Clock

For flood-affected farmers across the six towns, the survey's real consequence is what comes next: damage enumeration, crop-loss assessment, and compensation notifications. Broken roads threaten to slow the delivery of relief materials into marooned villages, adding urgency to repair timelines. All eyes now turn to whether the state will seek central disaster relief funds and how swiftly ex-gratia payments reach farmers who have lost their standing crops.

The hashtag #TogetherAgainstCycloneMurasu anchors the state government's public communication around the response — a signal that the administration is treating visibility and accountability as integral to its relief effort, not an afterthought.