A favourite question of parliamentarians that has repeated, time after time, in every session of Parliament since 2002, is fittingly about time. Cutting across party lines, members from both Houses have for two decades asked the Centre at least 16 times if India proposes to have two time zones and the steps taken to implement it.
First raised in March 2002, the question was effectively settled in August of that year. “No,” then Minister of State for Science and Technology Bachi Singh Rawat told Rajya Sabha Member M. Sankaralingam.
A ‘High Level Committee’ (HLC) constituted by the Department of Science and Technology in that year had studied the issue and concluded that multiple zones could cause ‘difficulties’ that would disrupt the smooth functioning of the “airlines, Railways, radio, television and telephone services” and so it was best to continue with a unified time, said Mr. Rawat.
Early sunrise and sunset
The demand for two time zones rose because the northeastern India and the Andaman and Nicobar islands, because of their geography, see an early sunrise and sunset relative to the rest of the country. But because clocks didn’t account for this and official working hours being the same everywhere, valuable working hours were lost in the morning and unnecessary electricity was consumed in the evening hours in these regions and therefore, following a widely prevalent global practice — the U.S. has five time zones, Russia 11 — India too ought to have multiple ones, the reasoning goes.
The expert committee, while not favouring multiple time zones, recommended that work timings in the eastern States be advanced by one hour, to “gainfully utilise” the morning hours and would involve only administrative instructions in this regard by the authorities concerned.
Yet the matter hasn’t seen closure.
BJ Panda, MP, Rajya Sabha and then with the Biju Janata Dal, was the first to raise this question in 2002, a few months before Mr. Sankaralingam. Mr. Panda raised the question again in 2007 on “whether there was a proposal to work out a separate time zone to save power in the northeastern region.”
This time Kapil Sibal, Science Minister in the governing United Progressive Alliance (UPA), almost verbatim repeated Mr. Rawat’s answer from five years ago: “The Committee observed that this does not provide any major advantage, yet on the other hand, pose several difficulties in terms of differential timings for airlines, Railways, radio and TV, STD [Subscriber Trunk Dialling] services etc. A more prudent and effective solution would be to advance the work timings by one hour in the eastern States, which can be implemented through administrative instructions.”
The question resurrected again, in 2010, this time by Sanjay Raut of the Shiv Sena. Then Minister of State for North Eastern Region, Prithviraj Chavan, reiterated Mr. Sibal’s answer.
Because Congress Ministers had said there was no plan to change time zones, it would appear that this question would receive quietus after 2014 when the NDA came to power. But beginning 2018, four Congress MPs raised this question, the latest being Deepinder Hooda as recently as February 2022, preceded by Manish Tewari, Pradyut Bordoloi — both in December ‘21 — and Komatireddy Venkat Reddy in 2019.
A trigger for this was an article in Current Science, one of India’s leading scientific journals. In it, scientists from the CSIR–National Physical Laboratory (NPL), Delhi, the lab that’s entrusted with maintaining Indian Standard Time, made the case for two separate time zones, citing among other things the 2017 Nobel Prize in physiology or medicine which was awarded to Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael Young. They had over decades discovered the molecular mechanisms governing the body’s internal clock, or circadian rhythm.
Productive hours of daylight
The hours of daylight were when humans were most productive because specific proteins were expressed in those hours that governed blood pressure, temperature and reflexes, their studies had shown. This was a compelling enough reason to have a separate time zone for the northeast, the NPL scientists wrote. They also calculated that having two time zones would save 2,00,000 units of electricity annually and an issue raised, by the earlier committee, of potential train accidents could be solved if the time zone were set on the longitude passing through the West Bengal–Assam border where train inter–crossings were minimal.
While scientifically plausible, it failed, as before, to cut ice with the government.
“Why this hasn’t happened so far is because of political reasons,” one of the scientists aware of government deliberations on the topic told The Hindu on condition of anonymity, “A separate time zone, it was feared, would lead to northeasterners seeing themselves as separate from the rest of the country and provoke secessionist demands. So irrespective of the party in power, it is unlikely that this demand will ever be met.”
Though the Centre has never admitted to this in public, the phrase “strategic reasons” popped into the responses of BJP Ministers to queries by Congress parliamentarians, along with the standard–line justification.
To Rajya Sabha Congress MP Pradeep Kumar Balmuchu, in 2018, Science Minister Harsh Vardhan responded: “...[There is] a lack of detailed studies on perception and social impact on northeastern region due to shifting of Indian Standard Time and its cost implications for the Railways and other utility providers. In this meeting, the DST’s [Department of Science and Technology] stand was reiterated that the earlier High–Level Committee had not recommended two time zones in view of strategic and cost implications.”
Before it became a Communist state, China had five time zones until they were abolished by Mao Zedong for Beijing standard time so that a centralised standard time would also keep the country united.
Bordoloi, a Congress leader from Assam, told The Hindu that he had not only asked a question in the Lok Sabha but had even moved a Private Member’s Bill on the issue. “My Bill was admitted but a discussion hasn’t taken place.” The northeastern region wasted about five hours of daylight every day and “precious productivity in the name of security and strategic reasons”.
He mentioned in his Bill that during summers, daylight broke at 4:20 a.m. at Vijaynagar (Arunachal Pradesh), while in Jaisalmer (Rajasthan), day breaks two hours later. “There is no scientific basis to not have a dual time zone. All over the world, there are different time zones to maximise productivity.”
Question becomes irrelevant
While it is unclear if this question will ever see closure, some experts say the widespread adoption of the mobile phone may have made the question irrelevant.
Dinesh Aswal, former Director of the NPL and one of the authors of the Current Science study, said while technological implementation “wasn’t a challenge”, work had ceased to be a 9–5 activity. “To be in tune with the biological clock for all–round better health was one of the reasons why we’d suggested this but with everyone always on the phone, we’ve anyways disconnected from our natural rhythm,” he said.
(With inputs by Sandeep Phukan)
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