Hundreds still stranded, plants closed in India's flood-hit Chennai

Foxconn Technology

08/12/2023 09:03

By Praveen Paramasivam
       CHENNAI, Dec 8 (Reuters) - Volunteers waded through
stagnant water to hand out food and supplies, and some
manufacturing plants remained shut in India's southern
tech-and-auto hub district of Chennai on Friday, four days after
cyclone Michaung lashed the coast.
    At least 14 people, most of them in Chennai and its state of
Tamil Nadu, have died in the flooding, triggered by torrential
rains that started on Monday.
    The cyclone itself made landfall further north in Andhra
Pradesh state on Tuesday afternoon.
    Authorities said some low-lying areas of the state were
still inundated and government officials and volunteers were
taking supplies to people stuck in their homes in slums and
other areas.
    The larger Chennai area is home to the Indian units of
several global firms including Hyundai Motor  005380.KS ,
Daimler and Apple's  AAPL.O  Taiwanese suppliers Foxconn
 2317.TW  and Pegatron  4938.TW .
    While many of them including Pegatron and Foxconn resumed
operations within a day or two of the cyclone making landfall,
some plants of the TVS group located in the worst-affected areas
are yet to open, industry sources said.
    Information technology (IT) services providers in the city
announced work-from-home policies for the week, while schools
and colleges closed. A few schools and colleges were converted
into temporary shelters.
    This week's floods in Chennai brought back memories of the
extensive damage caused by floods eight years ago which killed
around 290 people.
    In Andhra Pradesh, the damage from the cyclone was
relatively contained, with roads damaged and trees uprooted as
big waves crashed into the coast.
    Defence Minister Rajnath Singh visited Chennai on Thursday
and announced New Delhi will release a second instalment of 4.5
billion rupees ($54 million) to Tamil Nadu to help manage the
damage. The federal government has also approved a 5.6
billion-rupee project for flood management in Chennai, he said.
    Chennai residents questioned the ability of the city's
infrastructure to handle extreme weather.
    "Not only has urbanisation itself caused a problem, but the
nature of the urbanisation has preyed upon open spaces, holding
areas like marshlands and flood plains," social activist
Nityanand Jayaraman said.
    Experts have, however, said better stormwater drainage
systems would not have been able to prevent the flooding caused
by very heavy and extremely heavy rains.
        "This solution would have helped a lot in moderate and
heavy rainfall, but not in very heavy and extremely heavy
rains," Raj Bhagat P, a civil engineer and geo-analytics expert,
said on Wednesday.
  
($1 = 83.3720 Indian rupees)

 (Additional reporting by Rama Venkat in Bengaluru; Editing by
YP Rajesh and Andrew Heavens)
 ((praveen.paramasivam@thomsonreuters.com))