The case for having Three Time Zones in India
Today, I came across an article saying that the government is assessing the feasibility of having different time zones in India. This got me thinking — is there really a need to have different time zones? If you think of it naively, having a standardized time zone may be a good thing, since the entire country follows one time — you don’t have to worry about changing times when visiting different cities or states, different television broadcasters don’t have to worry about airing the same show at different times. However, if we dig deeper, we see that having different time zones may not be a bad thing after all. (And realize that I’m a huge map geek and would do anything to satisfy my map fetish)
The case for having different time zones has been around for quite some time now. Many activists, primarily in the Northeast have been appealing for a time zone different from the rest of India. Their argument makes a lot of sense because sunset and sunrise times in the northeast are very different to the rest of India. For example, in summer, the sun would rise at 4 am in Assam and 5:30 am in New Delhi. This means that by the time the government offices start work (which is generally at 10 am) literally half the day has passed in Assam. That’s a lot of daytime wasted. And since the sun also sets early — well before the offices close, they are forced to rely on artificial lighting, wasting a lot of energy. When I thought about this it suddenly made a lot of sense to me. I was born and brought up in Kutch, the westernmost part of India. I remember in winter the sun would rise as late as 7:30 a.m. but since we were running in a single standard time zone my school would always begin at 8 a.m throughout the year. So, we had to rely on artificial lights to get ready for school. Imagine how much energy is wasted if this happens every single day. This is the sort of problem that can be easily resolved by ensuring that everybody lives in a time that is right for the geographical place.
My curiosity to know more about time zones and their history led me to this portal that describes the origin of the time zone system. To summarize, the concept of having standardized time zone was invented in 1878 by Scottish Canadian engineer Sir Sanford Fleming. At the time this was devised as a solution to the problems faced by railroad companies who wanted to create efficient timetables for travel between the eastern and western regions United States and Canada which had huge differences in local times. No surprise that these railroad companies were the first to adopt Fleming’s time zones in 1883, and it was globally accepted in 1884, in the first ever International Prime Meridian conference in Washington DC, where it was agreed that the longitude of Greenwich, England would be designated as the Prime Meridian (0°) and that all time zones be decided with respect to this line. Fleming’s time zone system is simple at heart — since the Earth’s rotation covers an angle of 360 degrees in 24 hours a time difference of 1 hour would amount to a longitude difference of 15°, and so longitudes that were multiples of 15° were assigned standardized time zones. However, this has changed with time, with different countries adopting their own time zones. For example, Russia has nine different time zones (from GMT +3 to GMT +12) which don’t follow a linear increasing sequence. Time zones can get messy in general as different states/provinces within a country can adopt to follow different time zones, and different regions within states can choose to follow different time zones. To know more about the messiness of time zones check out this video.
Talking about time zones for India, if we look at the sunrise times at different cities in India we see that the sunrise time difference between Dong in eastern Arunachal Pradesh and Lakhpat in western Gujarat is almost 2 hours! (more precisely, an hour and 50 minutes). Certainly then, it makes sense to have more than one time zone in the country. But how many time zones should you have? And where should you place them? You could argue that time zones are mostly an hour apart, so a difference of 2 hours means we should have 2 time zones. And you wouldn’t be wrong (in fact, that’s what the government is thinking as well). But I feel it is best if we have 3 different time zones, and I give two reasons for this. One reason is, the time zones were originally designed to be on longitudes that were multiples of 15° from the Prime Meridian. We have two such longitudes within the mainland - the 75° East and the 90° East, both of which surround the central part of India, hence it makes sense to have three different time zones. The other, more important reason is that India is vastly populated and if all these people can use the natural light for as long as possible then we save a tremendous amount of energy overall.
And so, we set out to seek what the time zones would look like and what locations would be good to set as time zone borders. If we consider three time zones, the easiest way to name them would be call them the Western, Central and Eastern Time Zone, which would be GMT +5, GMT +6 and GMT +7 respectively. Now for the time zone borders, I looked at the longitude map of India (more fetish), and saw that the 75° longitude passes closest to the city of Dharwad in Karnataka — this could be a good place for a time-zone boundary. There are other cities which are close in longitude to this boundary — Amritsar in Punjab, Sikar in Rajasthan, Ratlam in Madhya Pradesh, and Aurangabad in Maharashtra.
Finding the time zone division for the 90° longitude is much easier — there are no cities with fall directly on this longitude, but the state of West Bengal has its border close to it, and so the state border could be used as the time zone boundary. That would also give the Northeast India its separate time zone (except Sikkim, but hopefully Sikkim wouldn’t complain too much).
However, it is pretty much expected that most states would want to have a single time zone within their spanning regions. Having different time zones in a state could cause a problem for people traveling between different cities within a state (especially close to the time zone boundaries), local television broadcasters would have to air the same program at different times. The states that could have such problems would be Jammu & Kashmir, Punjab, Rajasthan, Maharashtra and to some extent Karnataka, as the 75° longitude cuts through these states. It would be easier for them to stick to the time zone which spans the major part of the state. For the 90° longitude boundary, there would be no such problems, since it lies on a state boundary. The state wise time zone map would be something like the one shown below
I fully understand that having multiple time zones would be a logistical nightmare in many ways. But apart from enjoying my map geekiness, I seriously think having different time zones would make life easier for a common man as it could also bring a lot of energy savings which translates to monetary savings, which could be used to buy other things (like maps).
