India needs two time zones

The time difference between the westernmost point in the Kutch in Gujarat to the Eastern end of the country is about two hours. One with a basic understanding of science, or even with some common sense, would intuitively realize that the country lying East of India’s meridian, Allahabad, is ahead of the rest of the country. And the west is struggling to keep up with Allahabad. And, then also, the sun sets earlier in the east than the rest of India.

So what does that mean you ask?

Consider getting up in the morning when your alarm cries out loud at 6 AM in the morning. You wake up – but, the sun is already shining bright and the day has already broken to its full glory. Your biological clock says it is time you should have been fully active. By the time, you are in office and the clock probably says 9:30 or 10:00 in the morning, you find the heat at peak. By no means is it the time to begin your day, you feel. And then, by the time you get into your mood to work, may be when the clock says 11:00 AM, your body yearns for food, because it probably is close to lunch time!

And, consider the evenings. The clock says it is 4:00 PM – but, the sun is preparing to retire for the day. You find it hard to resist calling it a day and retiring back to home as well. It is probably already about 5 in the evening. But, then the official time, the clock says needs you to work another two hours!

Add to this the unrelenting humidity, heat, electricity problems, population density – and you may realize by the time you reach office at the clock-wise ‘beginning of the day’, you are in no position to be efficient.

This is a practical problem in the Eastern part of the country. Very much so. Day in and day out, pulling back the East by as much as an hour has virtually killed the productivity of most people. The climate of several places in the east is quite humid as well.

But, people living in other parts of the country may find it hard to empathise with it, since it is mostly jargons when put down on paper. The easiest way to probably understand the effect is to imagine, if for a day, the whole of India were forced to follow the time of Kabul or Abu Dhabi. Imagine how much of chaos it would lead to.

Wasting an hour of productive daylight time, the most productive time of the day for no reason. And imagine repeatedly doing this for 70 years – yes, every day since independence! Imagine the amount of loss in productivity of the entire population.

It is also known that by not utilizing the daylight hours in the eastern part of the country adequately, there is a significant wastage of energy. Because the day’s work begins late as per the local (read ‘real’) timeand ends late (where the sun probably sets at 4 or 4:30 PM locally), there is a massive consumption of electricity, that would not be required if the local time were made official.

Renowned film maker JahnuBarua has been actively campaigning for two time zones for more than two decades. He had been quite far sighted to realize that such a problem exists. Though he has spent much energy, there hasn’t been a favourable result yet. Recently, the Chief Minister of Assam, TarunGogoi had favoured the idea.In Assam, apparently, tea gardens follow a different time zone already that is an hour ahead of the rest of the country. One of the main reasons for such a custom time zone is to utilize the most productive hours of the day.

Another change that had been recommendedby scientists at NIAS in 2010 was to advance the IST by 30 minutes to the east to address the same problem. The rationale behind this suggestion was that the introduction of two time zones may be helpful – but, it would be too chaotic and costly. However, by advancing the Indian time by 30 minutes, the problem could be ideally addressed. Aside from the much better utilization of daylight for the eastern states, it estimated it would save more than two billion units of electricity every year!

Interestingly, pre-independence, the British Indian administration had two time zones in the country - the Bombay Time and the Calcutta Time. It seems the British were appreciative of the practical realities of individual states. Post-independence, the Calcutta Time was abandoned in the year 1948 and the Bombay Time was abandoned in 1955.

Incidentally in 2001, the government did appoint a committee under the Ministry of Science and Technology to study the merit of the suggestion of having two time zones instead of a single one. The committee had then rejected the idea and the then Minister of Science and Technology, KapilSibal’s answer to the question in Rajya Sabha was too cursory to hint even a nominal appreciation of a real problem that is costing the country on a daily basis and has cost us an inestimable loss over the last seventy years!

It seems to have been a matter of cosmetic national unity that could only have driven the decision to go from two time zones to a single time zone on independence. In reality, it does not even matter if India really has two time zones or a single one that is 30 minutes advanced. But, what is dangerous is that India seems to be lacking the necessary scientific temperament to appreciate the magnitude of this problem. This is probably one of the very fundamental reasons that the eastern states lag behind the rest of the country, in terms of productivity.

The fact that every year is probably costing India estimable money to the order of thousands of crores along with many more thousands of crores worth of human productivity and development and that this does not concern any administration needs to change. At the minimal, a serious deliberation needs to happen. This one step could solve a large chunk of our many developmental challenges!

By Siddhartha Purkayastha