Relevance: GS-3: Functions and responsibilities of the Union and the States, issues and challenges pertaining to the federal structure; Government policies and interventions for development in various sectors and issues arising out of their design and implementation;

Relevance: GS-3: Science and Technology - developments and their applications and effects in everyday life.

Key Phrases: Multiple Time Zones, Indian Standard Time, Greenwich Mean Time, Chaibagaan time, CSIR–National Physical Laboratory (NPL), circadian rhythm, strategic and cost implications.

Why in News?

• 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.

Key Points:

• On September 1, 1947, the phenomenon of IST (Indian Standard Time) was introduced to the country as its official time.
  • At present, the country observes a single time zone based on the longitude passing through 82°33′E.
  • The standard time of five and a half hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time is observed throughout the country.
  • Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) is the mean solar time at the Royal Observatory in Greenwich, London.
• Council of Scientific & Industrial Research’s National Physical Laboratory (CSIR-NPL) is India’s national timekeeper, which maintains the IST.

Need:

• 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.
  • During summers, daylight broke at 4:20 a.m. at Vijaynagar (Arunachal Pradesh), while in Jaisalmer (Rajasthan), day breaks two hours later.
• 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, experts suggests following a widely prevalent global practice of having multiple time Zones (the U.S. has five time zones, Russia 11).
• Before independence, the country was following three major time zones — Bombay, Calcutta and Madras Time.
  • Even now, unofficially, the tea gardens of Assam have been following ‘Chaibagaan time’ which is one hour ahead of the IST.

Govt Stand:

• First raised in March 2002, the question was effectively settled in August of that year.
  • Denying the request, then Minister of State for Science and Technology told Rajya Sabha that a ‘High Level Committee’ (HLC) constituted by the DST 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.
• 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.
• Moreover, on political front, a separate time zone, is feared, would lead to north-easterners seeing themselves as separate from the rest of the country and provoke secessionist demands.
  • 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.

New Insight:

This issue refuse to settle down and has been repeatedly being voiced in Parliament.

• Recently, 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.

Scientific basis of the argument:

• 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.
• 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 20 million kWh of electricity annually.
• Moreover, the 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.

Govt. Response:

While scientifically plausible, it failed, as before, to cut ice with the government.

• To a Rajya Sabha question in 2018, Science & Tech. Minister 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.”

Conclusion:

• 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.
• While technological implementation may not be a big 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.

Source: The Hindu

Mains Question:

Q. Critically analyse the feasibility of multiple time zones in India.