With a cyclone bearing down, Kandhamal district in Odisha is not waiting — 2,394 people, including 146 pregnant women, have already been moved to safety from 18 panchayats as of Monday, 2 November 2026. The Chief Minister's Office of Odisha confirmed the full preparedness mobilisation on X, painting a granular picture of a district-level machine in motion.

2,394 evacuated — and who is being prioritised first

The headline number is telling: of the 2,394 people relocated so far, 146 are pregnant women — a deliberate priority in Odisha's cyclone playbook that reflects hard lessons from past disasters. All 35 permanent concrete shelters in the district are operational, stocked with food, drinking water, electricity, and medicines. No one is being moved into a bare room.

The post, written in Odia, confirms: 'prasaasan sampurna sajaga rahichhi' — 'the administration remains completely alert.' That phrase carries institutional weight in a state that has rebuilt its entire emergency architecture since the catastrophe of 1999.

NDRF, ODRAF, and 37 JCBs — the muscle behind the numbers

On the ground, Kandhamal has deployed 2 NDRF teams, 1 ODRAF team, and 9 fire service teams — a combination of national and state capacity. The National Disaster Response Force is India's premier central rescue unit; ODRAF, Odisha's own Disaster Rapid Action Force, was built specifically to bridge the gap between a cyclone's landfall and when federal resources arrive at scale.

Clearing roads after a storm is often the difference between survivors getting help in hours or days. Kandhamal has pre-positioned 37 JCB excavators, along with generators and water tankers spread across all 12 blocks. The district control room is active and under continuous officer supervision.

Why an inland district runs coastal-grade drills

Kandhamal is not on the coast — yet it sits in a belt of Odisha that absorbs devastating rainfall from Bay of Bengal storms funnelled inland, triggering flash floods and landslides through its hilly terrain and significant tribal settlements. That geographic reality has pushed the district into the same preparedness tier as coastal counterparts.

The blueprint Kandhamal is running today traces directly to the 1999 Super Cyclone, which killed more than 10,000 people across Odisha and shook the state into building one of India's most systematic early-evacuation frameworks. Cyclone Fani in 2019 became the proof point: over 1.2 million people were evacuated across coastal Odisha with minimal casualties, and those standard operating procedures have since spread to interior districts.

The real test, as always, is what happens when the storm actually arrives — whether the shelters hold, whether the JCBs move fast enough, and whether the 2,394 people already inside those 35 shelters stay safe. Odisha has made that outcome more likely than almost any other state in India. Now the district waits.