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NEW DELHI - The Indian capital Sunday saw its first winter frost in 70 years as a cold wave sweeping in from the Himalayas killed more people in northern India overnight, officials said.
The capital city of 14 million people ordered schools shut for three days from Monday as the mercury for the first time since 1935 fell to 0.2 degrees Celsius (32.36 Fahrenheit), leaving mounds of ice on parked cars.
White-laced streets greeted early risers, but any novelty value brought by the cold soon died as frost on power cables sparked partial power cuts across large swathes of New Delhi, said the privately-run BSES utility provider.
On January 16, 1935, Delhi recorded minus 0.6 degrees Celsius.
"I was born in New Delhi and this is the first time we are seeing ice on grass," said Supriya Singh, a fashion designer. "It's just like snow ... It's heavenly."
Her jubilation was not shared by the homeless thousands.
The city municipality late Sunday rushed to set up community shelters for some of the city's 150,000 homeless people as the weather office warned the severe chill would continue.
"The indications are that these conditions would continue for the next two days before the temperatures rise," a spokesman for New Delhi's meteorological department told AFP.
Haryana state's Karnal city, which adjoins New Delhi, also shivered at 0.1 degrees Celsius, eight degrees below normal for this time of year, he said.
Overseas visitors received a taste of the cold snap in the popular desert resort of Pushkar in Rajasthan state, where a Hindu priest succumbed to the bitter cold overnight, the United News of India reported.
Nearby Churu felt the icy sting as the mercury tumbled six degrees Celsius to minus three degrees Celsius (26.6 degrees Fahrenheit) in the remote desert township, the weather office reported, adding that it was last this cold in 1974.
The army evacuated troops from their insulated bunkers on the Siachen glacier as temperatures dipped below minus 40 degrees Celsius in parts of the 6,969 metre (23,000 foot) high Himalayan wasteland, defence ministry sources said.
The cold death toll, meanwhile, rose by another nine to a total of 146 since early December as eight more people died in Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, and one in distant West Bengal province.
Uttar Pradesh so far accounts for 112 of the deaths, police spokesman Avinash Mehrotra said in the state capital Lucknow.
Ten people have died in adjoining Bihar state while the bad weather has claimed 18 lives in the northern state of Punjab, four in Haryana, one in Rajasthan and another in West Bengal state, officials said in separate reports.
Also on Sunday, two men and four women were killed in Punjab when a truck rammed their car on a highway in dense fog, which has sowed havoc with air, rail and road traffic in northern India, the police said.
Last year, some 420 people died from cold in Uttar Pradesh alone.
- AFP /ls
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