The capital city of 14 million people ordered schools shut for three days beginning Monday as the mercury for the first time since 1935 plummeted to 0.2 degrees C (32.36 F) Sunday, leaving mounds of ice on cars parked in the open.

White-laced streets greeted early risers in New Delhi but any novelty value brought by the cold temperatures soon died as frost on power cables sparked partial power cuts across large swathes of the crowded city, the privately-run BSES utility provider said.

In 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... It's just like snow... It's heavenly," said Supriya Singh, a fashion designer. Her jubiliation was not shared by the city's homeless thousands.

Haryana state's Karnal city which adjoins New Delhi also shivered at 0.1 Celsius, eight degrees below normal for this time of the year, the weather officials said.

Overseas visitors received a taste of the unusual winter in the immensely-popular and usually warm 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 C (26.6 F) in the remote desert township, the weather office reported, adding that it was last this cold in 1974.

The Indian army was evacuating troops from their insulated bunkers in the Siachen glacier as temperatures went down below minus 40 degrees C (minus 40 in sectors of the 23,000-foot high (6,969-metre) Himalayan wasteland, defence ministry sources said.

"Nothing can survive in such conditions up there and most of our men are now down at lower altitudes," an official said.

The toll from the cold wave, meanwhile, rose to 137 as the eastern Indian state of Bihar reported that 10 people, mostly homeless, had died of the cold since the beginning of last month.

Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous and one of its poorest states, so far accounts for 104 of the deaths, police spokesman Avinash Mehrotra said in the provincial capital of Lucknow.

The unrelenting bad weather has also claimed 18 lives in the northern state of Punjab, four in nearby Haryana and one in Rajasthan, officials said in separate reports.

Airports across northern Indian reported chaos in weekend scheduled flights as fog reduced visibility on the runways. Several inter-state train services were also cancelled and some more delayed because of thick fog.

Last year, some 420 people died from cold in Uttar Pradesh alone.

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