They had earlier said more than 1,000 people were missing in the state, including scores of fishermen, but some of them had returned to shore.

"Of the over 1,000 missing people, 150-200 fishermen have been traced and are safe," top state disaster management official Shashank Goel told Reuters.

He said flood waters had started to recede as rains had eased in the region.

Rescue workers in motorised rubber dinghies picked up people stranded in floods, while military helicopters dropped food and water packets to marooned people and lifted them off rooftops. Thousands were evacuated to relief camps.

"Water entered my house around midnight on Monday. We lost everything, including our clothes," Samba Siva Rao, a coastal resident, told Reuters by telephone from a relief camp.

Most of the 50 killed in Andhra Pradesh were either electrocuted or died in house collapses, officials said.

In Bangladesh, leaders of the low-lying nation's fishing community said on Wednesday they had not heard from about 300 fishermen after the storm triggered high waves and heavy rain along the coast this week.

"We are expecting some of them to come back," Kabir Ahmed Sawdagar told Reuters from the coastal city of Cox's Bazar, adding that in the past fishermen reported missing had returned safely weeks after a storm.

But Golam Mustafa Chowdhury, president of the Fishing Trawlers Association in the coastal district of Barguna, said 31 trawlers with about 450 fishermen sank during the storm and he feared most of the men on them had drowned.

TRANSPORT LINKS CUT

Other fishing groups said some missing fishermen had returned and others may have been pushed towards Indian waters.

Storms and cyclones that form in the Bay of Bengal in September and October slam into India's eastern coast and neighbouring Bangladesh almost every year.

In 1977, around 10,000 people were killed when a cyclone lashed Andhra Pradesh. Nineteen years later, some 2,000 people were killed in another cyclone. In Bangladesh, a cyclone left 143,000 people dead in 1991.

On Wednesday, there was no electricity in about 100 towns and 1,300 villages on Andhra Pradesh's coast where rail, air and road traffic has been severely disrupted.

With flood waters beginning to recede, most train services were expected to resume by Thursday, railway officials said.

Cargo handling at Visakhapatnam port -- one of India's busiest -- had resumed after being suspended for two days due to the storm.

Hundreds of vehicles were stranded on a key highway linking eastern India with the south of the country and the airport in the port city of Visakhapatnam was closed for the second day as its runway was still partially waterlogged.

Rains had eased in most parts of the state on Wednesday but its largest river, the Godavari, had burst its bank in several areas and was threatening to spill over. Officials said they were worried about losses to sugarcane, chilli and paddy crops.