With Cyclone 'Murasu' bearing down on the southern Odisha coastline, the state government has launched a war-footing evacuation operation — moving more than 1,60,000 people to safety and activating 552 shelters across five of its most vulnerable districts. The Chief Minister's Office of Odisha confirmed the scale of preparedness in a post on Tuesday, 3 November 2026, as heavy rain threatened to compound the cyclone's impact.

1,60,000 moved — Ganjam leads the numbers

The sheer scale of the evacuation tells the story. Of the 1,60,000-plus residents shifted to safe shelters across Gajapati, Ganjam, Malkangiri, Koraput and Kandhamal districts, Ganjam alone accounts for 1,51,400+ — a figure that reflects how exposed this densely populated coastal district is to Bay of Bengal weather systems. Evacuation operations remain 'ongoing with defined targets,' the CMO stated, signalling that the final numbers could climb higher before the storm makes landfall.

Of 2,441 shelters readied across the region, 552 are now fully operational, absorbing evacuees as the weather worsens. Schools, colleges and Anganwadi centres across the affected districts have been ordered shut.

1,068 pregnant women shifted to medical facilities

Perhaps the sharpest signal of how seriously the administration is treating this event: 1,068 pregnant women have been individually identified across the affected districts and pre-emptively moved to nearby hospitals and safe centres. It is the kind of granular, vulnerable-population targeting that has come to define Odisha's disaster protocol — and a direct lesson drawn from the institutional memory of two decades of cyclone response.

Emergency control rooms in all affected districts are operating round-the-clock, with senior administrative officers assigned to maintain close oversight. The CMO urged residents to stay alert and follow instructions from local authorities.

Odisha's zero-casualty doctrine, tested again

The state's cyclone-response architecture did not emerge overnight. After the catastrophic 1999 Super Cyclone — which killed nearly 10,000 people — Odisha rebuilt its disaster management framework from the ground up: early-warning networks, community-level evacuation drills, an expanding network of cyclone shelters. When Cyclone Phailin struck in 2013, the state evacuated over one million people ahead of landfall, turning near-certain mass casualties into a remarkably low death toll. That model is now second nature.

Cyclone Murasu, threatening the same southern coastal corridor, is the latest test of that institutional muscle memory. The numbers being reported — 1.6 lakh people evacuated before the storm arrives — suggest the machinery is functioning exactly as designed.

The administration's message to residents is direct: stay alert, follow local instructions, and trust the shelter network. As the cyclone approaches, the next 24-48 hours will determine how well those preparations hold.