People gather outside the Metro Rail Bhavan building as tremors were felt in the city and adjacent districts of West Bengal, in Kolkata, on February 27, 2026.
| Photo Credit: PTI
Strong tremors were felt in Kolkata and adjoining areas in West Bengal after an earthquake of 5.5 magnitude on the Richter Scale jolted parts of Bangladesh on Friday (February 27, 2026).
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See Details on AmazonPanic-stricken residents vacated their buildings and ran out to the streets, waiting for the tremors to pass while also anticipating aftershocks.
The earthquake occurred around 1.22 p.m. on Friday (February 27, 2026) and lasted for several seconds. Though the epicentre was in Bangladesh, strong tremors were felt in multiple districts across the State, including North 24 Parganas, Hooghly, and Howrah.
“I left my lunch and ran after I felt my chair shaking,” said an office worker from south Kolkata. Many like him were seen rushing out of offices and residential buildings as a precautionary measure.
The epicentre was roughly around 90 km from Kolkata at the Bangladesh border. Many felt their ceiling fans swing and windows rattle due to the impact of the tremors.
A building in Ganesh Chandra Avenue reportedly tilted, while one building in Lake Town developed cracks due to the impact.
Windows of a building in Bashirhat, North 24 Parganas district, were damaged. In the same district, a house reportedly collapsed in Minakhan, 40 km from the epicentre. Many buildings were also damaged in the area. No injuries have been reported so far.
The damage caused by the tremors is yet to be analysed by the State government and concrete numbers are awaited.
“Within the Bengal region, there are embedded fault zones, including the Sylhet Fault and the Calcutta-Mymensingh Hinge Zone, that can accumulate stress from plate motion over millions of years and then release it suddenly, producing an earthquake. The shallow depth of the earthquake and location near a complex network of faults in the Bengal Basin likely contributed to the quake occurring where it did,” Gourab Bhattacharya, professor of Earth Sciences at Tennessee Tech University, told The Hindu on Friday (February 27, 2026).
The Indian Plate is constantly moving northward and colliding with the Eurasian Plate along the Himalayan mountain chain. This collision, which makes the Himalayas an active tectonic region, does not happen in a single line but through several fault systems extending across the Bengal Basin, northeastern India, and into Bangladesh, Mr. Bhattacharya added.
Just three months back, a massive earthquake shook Bangladesh, the impacts of which were also felt in Kolkata. At least 10 people died in Bangladesh due to the quake in November 2025.
Published – February 27, 2026 02:02 pm IST
