Should India Have Two Time Zones? | Burning Issue – Editorial Analysis

BASICS

India is the 7th largest country in the world.
India occupies 2.4 percent of the total area of the world.
Most of the countries have multiple time zones.

Multiple Time Zones

Russia has 11 time zones.
France has 12 time zones.
The USA has 11 time zones.
Indonesia has 3 time zones (Indonesia is very small as compared to India)

TIME ZONES CAN BE CONTROVERSIAL TOPIC

China says there should be one time zone due. The communist party says this for “national unity”.

SHOULD INDIA HAVE TWO TIME ZONES?

Scientists at the Council of Scientific & Industrial Research’s National Physical Laboratory (CSIR-NPL), which maintains Indian Standard Time, have published a research article describing the necessity of two time zones, with the new one an hour ahead of the existing time zone.

THE ISSUE OF DAYLIGHT

The time difference between the westernmost part of India and the easternmost point is approximately two hours, the effect of which is that the sun rises and sets much earlier than it does in the rest of the country.

Most Indians are not particularly worried about Indian Standard Time (IST), except for those who live in the Northeast where the sun rises around 4 a.m. in summer and gets dark well before 4 p.m. in winter.

TIME IS MAINTAINED BY THIS METHOD

If lines of longitude are drawn precisely a degree apart, they will divide the Earth into 360 zones.

Because the Earth spins 360° in 24 hours, a longitudinal distance of 15° represents a time separation of 1 hour, and 1° represents 4 minutes.

NOTES

The geographic “zero line” runs through Greenwich, London.
It identifies GMT, now known as Universal Coordinated Time (UTC), which is maintained by the Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM) in France.

Indian Standard Time, maintained by CSIR-NPL, is based on a line of longitude that runs through Mirzapur in UP (Centre for measuring time by the Indian government).

At 82°33’E, the line is 82.5° east of Greenwich, or 5.5 hours (5 hours 30 minutes) ahead of UCT. While India follows one IST, the United States follows several time zones across its breadth

IMPORTANCE OF TWO TIME ZONES IN INDIA (ACCORDING TO NEW RESEARCH PAPER)

India stretches from 97.4 East in Arunachal to 68 East in Gujarat.

The time difference between the two extreme points is approximately two hours, the effect of which is that the sun rises and sets much earlier than it does in the rest of the country.

In the Northeast, the sun rises as early as four in the morning and winter it sets by four in the evening.

By the time government offices or educational institutions open, many daylight hours are already lost.

In winter this problem gets even more accentuated and the ecological costs are a disaster with much more electricity has to be consumed.

The National Institute of Advanced Studies claims that advancing IST by half an hour would result in saving 2.7 billion units of electricity every year.

THE GOVERNMENT HAS BEEN RELUCTANT

Two time zones are not advisable for India as it would cause ‘unimaginable chaos’, given the country’s demographic size.

People would have to adjust to multiple time zones & administrative integration would be difficult.

The railways are not yet automated enough to handle time shifts mid-journey and this could induce significant accidents due to human error.

There is also a strong political dimension to granting a separate time zone in the Northeast given the region’s long history of self-determination movements.