India is almost 3,000 km wide but has one time zone. Is it fair for the entire country to work according to one IST? Here is a look at the complete picture – time to get technical.
India lies east of the Greenwich Meridian line between 68.7 degrees and 97.25 degrees longitudes. Since every 15 degrees of longitude corresponds to one hour, there is a time difference of almost two hours between the western most and eastern most points of the country. This means that if someone living in the western end of the country (Gujarat) experiences sunrise at 6 am, the other end (Arunachal Pradesh) has already seen it at 4 am.
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According to media and new company , this is very inefficient in terms of making the most of the day as possible.
In the time of British rule in India, the British realized this problem and decided to split the country into two different time zones in 1884 after two of the most important cities of that era.
They were called Bombay Time and Calcutta Time.
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However, in 1904, when railway lines started linking up important places, a single time system had to be followed to avoid confusion. It was called Railway Time. It took a longitudinal reference that was somewhat midway between Bombay and Calcutta, which turned out to be Madras.
But the difference GMT and Indian Railway Time was considered imperfect. There was a pressing need to make Indian time ahead of GMT by exactly five and a half hours. The corresponding longitude for that would be 82.5 degrees E.
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The town of Mirzapur, in present day Uttar Pradesh was found to be on that very line. A clock tower that was constructed in 1891, was officially designated to show Indian Standard Time. This is what was followed for a very long time, even after India’s independence.
Today, IST is maintained by the National Physical Laboratory in Delhi through high-end Caesium atomic clocks. However, it has still not solved the problem of different daylight zones in the country, especially in the northeastern states, where a good number of daylight hours are wasted because of sticking to IST. As a consequence, people in cities like Guwahati spend an irrational number of daylight saving hours fast asleep and hours of darkness awake.
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Workers in tea plantations in Assam follow their own local time ‘Chai Bagan Time’ set one hour ahead of IST. In 2006, the planning endorsed the idea of having two separate time zones, but nothing much was done about it. A year later, scientists from the IISc in Bangalore said that there was no need to split the country into two time zones, rather reset IST six hours ahead of GMT instead of five and a half. This would result in India saving 2.7 billion units of electricity every year. This idea, however, did not take off either.
This is not all. There are other fears about multiple time zones. For example, confusion and ambiguity in travel schedules. But we need to look at other countries like the U.S. where airlines and railways function perfectly within four different time zones.
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Chine, which stretches more than 3,500 kms end-to-end, however, has only one time zone with an aim of fostering ‘national unity’.
For now, there does not seem to be any decision from the Indian government in solving the crisis of time between two parts of the country. This means, all of our watches and clocks will keep ticking to IST for a long time to come.
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