NEW DELHI—The monstrous Cyclone Phailin struck India’s eastern coastline on the weekend, washing away thousands of mud homes, knocking out power and communications, and blocking many of the region’s roads. But the storm also demonstrated how much India has transformed itself in recent years.

The authorities evacuated about 800,000 people, one of the largest such evacuations in India’s history. The storm’s maximum sustained winds, which were approximately 200 km/h when the storm made landfall about 9 p.m. Saturday, dropped to about 80 km/h by midafternoon Sunday.

There were scattered reports of deaths that together climbed past 20 by midday Sunday, including five in the coastal city of Gopalpur. The reports said most were killed by falling trees falls in the hours before the storm landed. The cyclone was expected to drop up to 250 millimetres of rain over two days in some areas.

Just 14 years ago, a cyclone in roughly the same place killed more than 10,000 people — another in more than a century of predictably deadly cyclones to roar out of the Bay of Bengal. While an accurate assessment of Phailin’s effects will probably take weeks, there were tentative signs Sunday that the death toll was likely to be relatively modest.

There are many reasons for the change, but a vastly improved communications system is probably the most important. Nearly a billion people routinely use mobile phones in India, up from fewer than 40 million at the turn of the century. Even many of the poorest villages now have televisions, and India’s news media market is saturated with 24-hour news channels that have blanketed the airwaves with coverage of the storm.

Many villagers refused to leave land and livestock during the worst of the storm, according to many reports. But almost none were unaware of the coming danger. And that is a huge change.

India’s state and central governments spent days preparing for the worst. Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said in a statement Saturday that he had been briefed on preparations for the storm and had directed the central government to extend all needed assistance to state officials.

Service members from the country’s army, air force and navy were deployed to help in rescue and relief operations, said A.K. Antony, India’s defence minister.

Visakhapatnam, which was near the centre of the storm, experienced little damage apart from a collapsed seawall in the fishing colony. By 9 a.m., the sun was shining, businesses had opened at their usual times, and traffic had resumed its usual chaos. People emerged from their homes Sunday with a sense of relief.

Tousis Ahmed, 30, stayed out late Saturday night and even swung by the beach, which had been cordoned off, to check on the ocean.

“The waves were calm, so I went home and had a sound sleep,” Ahmed said.

Indian storm experts may have struck the right note of caution in contrast to those in the U.S., where forecasts were far more alarmist than those in India.

Late Friday, the U.S. Navy’s Joint Typhoon Warning Center said the storm, then barrelling across the Bay of Bengal, had maximum sustained winds of 259 km/h, with gusts reaching 315 km/h, making it similar to a Category 5 hurricane, the most severe.

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That was a far more alarming assessment than the one being made at the time by the India Meteorological Department.

Perhaps most telling, India’s experts predicted a storm surge no higher than about 3.3 metres, while some in the U.S. predicted a surge nearly twice that high.

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