"The storm razed several villages bringing down hundreds of mud houses in the Sunderbans and east Midnapore districts," said Kanti Ganguly, the Sunderbans development minister in India's West Bengal state.

Twenty people were killed, 300 injured and more than 100 fishing trawlers -- each with at least 10 people on board -- were missing or out of radio contact, Ganguly said by telephone from the state capital Kolkata.

Thousands of trees, electricity masts and telephone poles were uprooted as strong winds with speeds of up to 60 kilometres (37 miles) per hour whipped through the districts, weather official G.C. Deb said.

"We expect rains to continue lashing the area for the next 48 hours," Deb said.

Road and rail traffic were thrown into disarray with many trains to the affected districts cancelled, the Press Trust of India news agency said.

The southern coast of neighbouring Bangladesh and its part of the Sunderbans were also hit hard.

"We have found dead bodies of four fishermen near Kuakata beach" on the south coast, said Shamsul Alam, the Red Cross's cyclone preparedness officer. A fifth body was reported to have been found further along the coast.

"More than 200 trawlers returned to the shore but still we have so far 58 trawlers with over 600 missing in the storm," said Alam.

The storm had caught the fishermen by surprise and many trawlers could not make shore, police in Bangladesh said.

Among those missing was the commander of a naval gunboat, the police chief of Bangladesh's coastal Begerhat district, Mostofa Kamal, said.

He was thought to have fallen from his ship and was feared drowned after the vessel was caught in the storm and drifted into the Sunderbans forests that surround the coast.

Two helicopters and coastguard rescue boats had rushed to the scene to try and find the commander but had been hampered in their search by continued bad weather, police said.

Red Crescent officials in Bangladesh estimate that every day at least 10,000 fishermen go to the Bay of Bengal to fish from the landing stations in and around the Sunderbans.

Boarding wooden trawlers, they stay in the sea for seven to 10 days before returning. During storms, they take shelter among the islands that dot the bay and sometimes in Indian coastal villages.

Police said a mild warning by the weather department might have led more fishermen than necessary to defy the rough weather.

"The Met office only gave cautionary signal number two to the fishermen. As a result, many fishermen did not take the warning seriously," the police chief of Patuakhali district, Shafiqul Islam, told AFP.

Storms and cyclones which form over the Bay of Bengal in September and October every year kill hundreds and destroy cattle and crops in Bangladesh and India's eastern states.

In a super cyclone in 1991, 150,000 people were killed when a 4.8-metre (16-foot) tide submerged the Bangladesh coast near Chittagong.

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