Most of the fatalities occurred when families were buried under mounds of rubble after the storm, which was accompanied by fierce winds, brought their houses down on top of them.

Sheets of tin used as roofing were sent flying during the tempest and added to the casualties.

The dead included 14 women and three children.

All the casualties were in Assam's Dhubri district, bordering Bangladesh, some 300 kilometres (185 miles) from the state capital Guwahati.

The Mancachar area was affected the worst, with about 1,000 houses being flattened in eight villages.

"The wind speed was so high that some people who came out of the houses were literally blown away," P.C. Bordoloi, the police chief of Dhubri, told AFP by phone.

The injured were being taken to hospitals, Bordoloi said.

Assam health minister Bhumidhar Burman told AFP: "Many of the injured were brought to the hospitals with broken limbs, head injuries and cuts -- besides shock and trauma.

"Relief and recue teams were rushed once we got the news although the inaccessible terrain was delaying our efforts."

Police and local authorities said they were not prepared for such a disaster and acknowledged that relief and rescue operations had been slow to get off the ground.

"The cyclone came all of sudden and caught people unawares," N. Dutta, a local police official, told AFP by telephone.

"There was no time for anyone to react as the cyclone accompanied by heavy rains and high winds left a trail of destruction."

Relief teams were facing problems as roads were blocked by big trees uprooted by the storm, he said.

Hundreds of police and paramilitary Border Security Force (BSF) personnel were helping rescue and relief operations.

Assam has been lashed by heavy rains and winds with speeds between 60 and 70 kilometres (37 and 42 miles) per hour for the past 10 days, causing extensive damage in the state.

The local meteorological office warned Wednesday that more thunderstorms with windspeeds exceeding 60 kilometres per hour were to be expected in the next couple of days.

"On April 22, winds of speeds up to 130 kilometres (81 miles) per hour hit several parts of the northeast," D. Sinha, director of the regional meteorological office in Guwahati said.

In adjoining Bangladesh, a tropical storm wreaked havoc in Dhaka, damaging five parked aircraft belonging to the national airline Biman, officials said Wednesday.

The metereological department said the storm was a "normal tropical one" with winds of up to 116 kilometres (72 miles) per hour.

Trees and billboards were uprooted, rickshaws were overturned and power poles were brought down, plunging the city into darkness for several hours.

SPACE.WIRE