INDIA: The cold spell sweeping northern India has claimed 30 more lives as the toll from the one-week bitter temperatures reached 232, officials said yesterday.
The mercury continued to dip to near-freezing levels in many parts of the vast Ganges plain and a blinding fog shut down airports and delayed trains for several hours across the region.
One man was found dead inside a stationary train where he had apparently taken shelter from the biting cold overnight and another on the railway station platform in Lucknow, capital of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, which has accounted for most of the deaths this season.
"He had frozen to death as he hardly had any winter clothing on his body," R.K. Bansal, a senior railway official in Lucknow, said of the man found dead in the rail car. "Railway station platforms are invariably packed with homeless people at night. Other than allowing them to use it as a shelter, there is little that we can do to save them from the chill." -(Reuters)