GUWAHATI, INDIA // The working day is just beginning in north-east India but the sun is already high and the heat is building to a peak. The reason? Despite the fact that this vast country covers territory stretching over several ltime zones, India has only one. And it makes for some curious anomalies, especially on the longest day of the year.
Though India stretches from the western Arabian Sea to east of Bangladesh, the clocks are all set to what time it is in a town in the state of Uttar Pradesh, near to the line of longitude closest to the centre of the country.
The policy on national time was set when India gained independence from Britain in 1947 but in the remote north-east, ministers now say Indian Standard Time (IST) makes little sense. Their region is closer to Dhaka, which is 30 minutes ahead, than Delhi. It shares borders with China, Myanmar and Bhutan as well as Bangladesh. Around the summer solstice, the sun rises at 4.15am in the far north-east — a good 90 minutes before dawn breaks on India’s west coast. It also sets early, at just 6.15pm. India’s norheast contains some of the country’s poorest states and being so out-of-sync is costing them dear in terms of development, productivity and the lighting bills for homes and offices.
“Definitely there is a loss of energy, a loss of workable hours," says Arup Kumar Datta, a writer in the north-eastern state of Assam who has campaigned on the issue. “A person is fresher [in the morning], but by the time you go to the office t 10 o’clock you have lost that energy."
Worse, other campaigners believe that a policy that was intended to unify a newly-independent India has ended up increasing the sense of alienation in the north-east which is already plagued by myriad separatist insurgency movements.
“People are not fools," said Bahrua, who has campaigned for decades for a separate time zone for the region. “Slowly they are becoming aware of the rest of the world, and when they realise they have literally been kept in the dark, of course they feel alienated."
Bahrua grew up on a tea plantation in Assam state, where work started at 6am to make the most of the daylight. Some of the plantations in Assam still operate on their own time — known locally as “tea garden time" which is a hangover from the days of British rule. But Bahrua says most have switched to IST, meaning the back-breaking work of picking tea begins when the sun is nearing its hottest.
Akhil Ranjan Dutta, a politics professor at Guwahati University in Assam, says he only became aware of the problem when he moved from the countryside to the state capital for his studies.
“In the village we used to go to bed at seven in the evening and rise at two or three in the morning," he said. “Then I came to college and I couldn’t change my habits. My friends would all laugh at me ... You can’t have one time zone for a country like India which is so vast. This has to change."
Of the other large countries, all but China observe differing time zones. Mainland US has four, Australia three and Russia has nine. But previous proposals to set up separate time zones in India have fallen on deaf ears.
In 2006 India’s planning commission said having two time zones would lead to substantial energy savings in a country that frequently suffers power cuts but the central government rejected the plan.
When scientists from the National Institute of Advanced Studies in Bangalore studied the problem in 2007 they concluded separate time zones would cause chaos, advocating instead a 30-minute advancement of IST.
But one glimmer of hope is offered by the new state government of Assam, which is led by prime minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP).
Himanta Biswa Sarma, a senior minister who is credited with winning the state for the BJP, said local legislators planned to take the matter up with the central government in Delhi.
“They should allow the north-east a separate time zone, because it is becoming an economic waste," said Mr Sarma in Guwahati. “Many people think that this will actually be the beginning of some secessionist movement. There are many counterarguments. But I believe that India has evolved. We are not in that society now."
* Agence France-Presse
