Chindia Alert: You’ll be Living in their World Very Soon
aims to alert you to the threats and opportunities that China and India present. China and India require serious attention; case of ‘hidden dragon and crouching tiger’.
Without this attention, governments, businesses and, indeed, individuals may find themselves at a great disadvantage sooner rather than later.
The POSTs (front webpages) are mainly 'cuttings' from reliable sources, updated continuously.
The PAGEs (see Tabs, above) attempt to make the information more meaningful by putting some structure to the information we have researched and assembled since 2006.
Image copyright AFPImage caption Embankments have been washed away in Bangladesh
Millions of people across Bangladesh and eastern India are taking stock of the devastation left by Cyclone Amphan.
A massive clean-up operation has begun after the storm left 84 dead and flattened homes, uprooted trees and left cities without power.
India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi has arrived in West Bengal state to conduct an aerial survey.
Authorities in both countries had evacuated millions of people before the storm struck.
Covid-19 and social-distancing measures made mass evacuations more difficult, with shelters unable to be used to full capacity.
Officials also said people were afraid and reluctant to move to shelters for fear of contracting the virus.
The cyclone arrived with winds gusting up to 185km/h (115mph) and waves as high as 15ft.
Image copyright REUTERSImage caption Roads have been blocked by falling trees in BangladeshImage copyright AFPImage caption Many people have been injured in wall collapses in Bengal
It is the first super cyclone to form in the Bay of Bengal since 1999. Though its winds had weakened by the time it struck, it was still classified as a very severe cyclone.
Three districts in India’s West Bengal – South and North 24 Parganas and East Midnapore – were very badly hit.
In Bangladesh, there are reports of tens of thousands of homes damaged or destroyed and many villages submerged by storm surges in low-lying coastal areas like Khulna and Satkhira.
The affected areas include the Sunderbans, mangroves spread over an area of more than 10,000 square kilometres that spans both India and Bangladesh – the swampy islands are home to more than four million of the world’s poorest people.
Image copyright MUKTIImage caption Many homes, built of brick and mud, have been washed away
Those in the Sunderbans say it is too early to estimate casualties in the area, which is now cut-off from the mainland by the storm.
“There are houses which have collapsed and people could be trapped in them but we don’t know yet,” Debabrat Halder, who runs an NGO in one of the villages, told the BBC.
He recalls cyclone Bulbul in November 2019, which was followed by a huge incidence of fever, diarrhoea and flu, and is afraid that that the same may happen again.
And worse, he adds, is that the flooding from contaminated sea water, has likely destroyed the soil.
“Nothing will grow in this soil,” he says, adding that it will likely take years to convert it into fertile land again.
Image copyright MUKTIImage caption The Sunderbans delta is frequently hit by severe stormsImage copyright MUKTIImage caption Crops have all been destroyed by the flooding
Kolkata, the capital of West Bengal, and one of India’s biggest cities has been devastated. Its roads are flooded and the city was without power for more than 14 hours.
The state’s chief minister, Mamata Banerjee, said the devastation in Kolkata was “a bigger disaster than Covid-19”.
But assessment of the damage is being hampered by blocked roads and flooding in all these areas.
Property management workers pull to safely elderly woman with Alzheimer’s disease climbing down side of building
The elderly woman with Alzheimer’s climbs down the outside of her residential building in Chengdu, Sichuan province, on Thursday. Photo: Weibo
An 84-year-old woman with Alzheimer’s disease in southwestern China stunned her neighbours by climbing out of a lavatory window in a high-rise building and down from her 14th-floor flat.
The octogenarian was rescued by property management workers, who were waiting near the window of a flat on the fifth floor to intercept her, news website Thepaper.cn reported.
The woman squeezed through the window of her home’s toilet in a residential block in Chengdu, Sichuan province, on Thursday after she was locked in by relatives, a property management employee said.
“She couldn’t open the door from inside. But she wanted to go out as it was so humid and hot today,” the unnamed worker said.
As she climbed down the outside of the building, her neighbours unfolded a bedsheet on the ground, hoping to catch her if she fell.
The elderly woman survived the incident unscathed. Photo: Weibo
Property management workers gave the woman water and food after rescuing her. She was later picked up by her relatives and was reported to have no injuries from her adventure, the report said.
There were 6 million Alzheimer’s disease patients in China in 2015, with around 300,000 new cases reported each year, news portal Sohu.com reported.
Chinese taxi driver takes his wife with Alzheimer’s to work every day
A 2016 white paper released by the Zhongmin Social Assistance Institute, a Beijing-based research NGO, said half a million old people got lost in China each year, with a quarter of them diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
“China is seriously hit by Alzheimer’s disease based on the country’s rapidly ageing population,” Dr Wang Luning, chairman of the Chinese Alzheimer’s Disease Association, told Legal Daily.
“But many people, even some doctors, have little knowledge about this disease, leading to low rates of people seeking diagnosis, the rate of them being diagnosed and being treated all being low.”
Image copyright AFP
Image copyright REUTERS
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Image copyright MUKTI
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CHINDIA ALERT: You'll be living in their world, very soon 