Cyclone Montha lashes India's east coast; kills one

One person was killed on India's eastern coast after Cyclone Montha made landfall around midnight, with heavy rain and gusty winds also damaging crops and utility poles, officials said on Wednesday.

India's weather department has forecast extremely heavy rain on Wednesday for the coastal states of Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Telangana and West Bengal with wind gusts of up to 90 kmph. The cyclone is expected to weaken to a deep depression later in the day.

A 48-year-old woman was killed in Andhra Pradesh's Konaseema district after a palm tree fell on her, local officials said.

As of Tuesday night, the government has reported damage to more than 38,000 hectares of crops, several power lines and utility poles in Andhra Pradesh.

Efforts were underway to restore power in areas where there had been outages.

Video from ANI, in which Reuters has a minority stake, showed rescue personnel in the state clearing away uprooted trees and cleaning roads as rain continued to fall.

Unseasonably heavy snow, due to weather changes brought on by the cyclone, has prompted authorities on the Tibet side of Mount Everest to halt visitor access to the world's highest mountain, a notice showed.