India said on Tuesday it had installed the world's highest public telephone booth on the 20,000-foot Siachen Glacier in Kashmir.

The Indian Defense Ministry said that soldiers fighting to keep the last post of a disputed 450-mile Himalayan border in Kashmir with Pakistan can now phone home."The Indian army established an STD-PCO (subscriber trunk dialling-public call office) for soldiers in Siachen Glacier . . . it becoming the world's highest PCO," it said in a statement.

Hundreds of Indian troops are dug in along the 50-mile-long glacier where Indian and Pakistani troops routinely exchange artillery fire.

At least 2,000 Indian army soldiers have lost their lives and more than 10,000 crippled in the fight to control the glacier that Indian troops captured in 1984, army officials said.

Temperatures in the icy glacier region reach a high of 15 degrees below zero.