Blog Post: S. Fazal Daoud Firdausi
India is a vast country. It is having an extensive east-west extent. It stretches for 2933 kilometres from Dong (Arunachal Pradesh) in the east (97° 25´ E) to Guhar Mota (Gujarat) to the west (68° 7´E). The total longitudinal spread is about 29°. Indian Standard Time (IST) is measured with reference to GMT from 82.5° longitude that passes through Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh.
It requires 4 minutes for the sun to pass one degree longitude. It will require (29 x 4) 116 minutes to move from the extreme east to the western portion of India. As a consequence, the northeastern part of India remains around 2 hour ahead of the western part of India. As per the current standard time, sunrise is as early as 4.00 a.m. and sunset by 4.00 p.m. in northeast India. However, tea gardens of Assam follow a separate time zone known as Chai Bagaan Time, which is one hour ahead of the IST. Labourers generally work in the tea gardens from 9 a.m. (IST 8.00 a.m.) to 5.00 p.m. (IST 4.00 p.m.). This system was introduced during British rule.
Problems due to single time zone
Due to this time difference, there is a lot of loss in the use of energy in the North East and the biological clock of the people also gets disturbed. It also has adverse effects on industrial and daily life. In 1980, a special committee set up by the government suggested dividing India into two or three time zones. In 2014, a demand for a separate time-zone for the northeast was also made. But this suggestion has been rejected from time to time (TOI).
Recent proposal for two time zones in India by the National Timekeeper
In 2019, India’s national timekeeper, Council of Scientific & Industrial Research’s National Physical Laboratory (CSIR-NPL), which maintains Indian Standard Time published a research paper describing the necessity of two time zones, with the new one an hour ahead of the existing time zone (Indian Express).
The paper called for two time zones IST-I (UTC + 5.30 h) and IST-II (UTC + 6.30 h). The proposed line of demarcation is at 89°52’E, the narrow border (Chicken Neck) between Assam and West Bengal. The States west of the line would continue to follow IST (to be called IST-I). States east of the line — Assam, Meghalaya, Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura, Andaman & Nicobar Islands —would follow IST-II (Indian Express).
Major challenges in creating two time zones- Many experts have warned that dividing India into two time zones will lead to ‘unimaginable chaos’.
- Lack of awareness among the masses and presence of manual systems will lead to problematic situations.
- Strategically, northeast India is situated at the periphery along with the borders of China. It is difficult to create a separate time zone in a region which has been reeling under crisis due to secessionist tendencies.