Chairing the 7th meeting of the Island Development Agency (IDA) here on Friday, Union Home Minister Amit Shah reviewed the progress of ongoing development initiatives in the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and Lakshadweep.
The quake hit the islands at 12:53 am on Saturday.
An earthquake of magnitude 4.3 on the Richter scale occurred 183 km southwest of Port Blair in the Andaman and Nicobar islands.
This comes a day later than the earlier announcement last week of the Southwest Monsoon reaching the South Andaman Sea on May 15.
“Yesterday morning, a low-pressure area was formed in south Andaman and southeast Bay of Bengal. We expect it to intensify. It will move in northwest direction and become a cyclonic storm by 8th evening. This will reach Odisha coast on 10th,” Umashankar Das, senior scientist at IMD stated.
The decision comes in the wake of a notification issued yesterday by Registrar General, Calcutta High Court in which several precautionary measures had been given.
The medium intensity earthquake with epicentre in the islands at a depth of 10 kilometres occurred at 6.09 am
The first jolt with a magnitude of 4.9 occurred at 5.14 AM, followed by another jolt with a magnitude of 5 a couple of minutes later.
Ross Island would now be called Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Dweep; Neil Island would be known as Shaheed Dweep, and Havelock Island would be renamed as Swaraj Dweep.
The aircraft flew down to Port Blair negotiating deteriorating weather over Andaman and Nicobar Islands which was likely to widen into a cyclone.
