More than two million people have been rendered homeless and food and cash crops worth Rs 300 crore destroyed in the cyclone that wreaked havoc on the coastal districts of Andhra Pradesh. It is feared that the orginal estimate of 10,000 dead is conservative. Many parts of the worst-affected Divi taluka in Krishna district are still inaccessible and the population of these areas is in the vicinity of 10,000.
JP On Rural India
Jayaprakash Narayan is for small-scale institutions, whether they are educational, medical or otherwise, at the same time, he wants the bigger institutions to decentralise their activities so that the less fortunate in other areas could benefit. The Sarvodaya leader was speaking at the golden jubilee celebration of the Hurkisondas Hospital in Bombay. Reminding the people that “India lives in villages,” JP wanted medical, educational and every other possible aid to be extended to villagers. The village women, especially, needed much more help than men since they were shy of even disclosing their diseases to avoid causing difficulties to others. He pleaded with urban people to form groups of volunteers and adopt villages with a view to preventing the migration of people to urban areas and metropolises.
Egypt’s Diplomacy
Egypt’s president, Anwar Sadat, said he was inviting the US, the Soviet Union, Israel and Arab countries involved in the West Asia crisis to come to Cairo to prepare for a reconvened Geneva peace conference. Sadat, speaking to the Peoples Assembly (Parliament) on his peace mission to Jerusalem, said he was asking his acting foreign minister, Boutros Ghali, to contact UN Secretary General Kurt Waldheim, and Moscow and Washington. “We should meet in Cairo to prepare for Geneva,” he said. The US and the Soviet Union were co-chairmen of the Geneva conference, which convened briefly in December 1973.