India is part of a small group of countries that share 30-minute differences, but this is the most unlikely case of all.
How India got “stuck” in its unique and unusual time zone
Nine hours and 30 minutes ahead of New York. Five hours and 30 minutes ahead of Lisbon. Three hours and 30 minutes behind Tokyo.
For more than a century, India’s clocks have officially been set one hour behind when calculating any time difference compared to most countries.
And although it is part of a small group of nations and territories that share that 30-minute difference – including Iran, Myanmar and parts of Australia – India is perhaps the most unlikely case.
The huge South Asian nation geographically spans what would normally be two time zones, but, much to the frustration of some groups, it clings to its unusual clock settings, refusing to separate itself from a system that has a long history. very complicated.
India’s half-hour time zone dates back to India’s colonial rule and the time when ever-faster steamships and trains shrank the world.
Until the 19th century, India – like most places in the world – operated on very localized schedules, which were often different not only from city to city, but also from village to village. However, the East India Company, a powerful and ruthless British-owned trading organization that gradually took control of large parts of the subcontinent, played a key role.
In 1792, the East India Company was running one of the first observatories in Asia, in Madras (now known as Chennai). A decade later, the first official astronomer at this observatory declared that Madras time was “the basis of Indian Standard Time”.
However, it took a few decades, the advent of steam locomotives and the commercial interests of the East India Company for this to be maintained.
India’s railway system was created in the mid-18th century. Hulton Collection Deutsch/Corbis/Getty Images
“Railways had enormous influence over colonial powers,” says Geoff Gordon, principal researcher in public international law at the University of Amsterdam.
“Before the railways won the contest for Madras, there was a contest between the powerful cities – Bombay, Calcutta,” adds Gordon. “That fight didn’t last long.”
However, similar debates around the world, motivated by the need to better coordinate transcontinental rail travel and improve maritime navigation, led to the establishment of the first international time zones at a conference in Washington DC, USA, in 1884.
The time zones were based on the Greenwich Meridian, a line of longitude that runs north to south through the Greenwich Observatory in London. Time zones east of the Meridian are typically later than Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) in hourly increments.
It took some time for the system to be adopted worldwide. In India, people were still arguing about Madras Time. Although the time was adopted by the country’s railways, it faced considerable opposition from workers and local communities who did not want strict new timetables imposed on them.
“There is less room for maneuver, since the rhythms of work are no longer linked to the boss down the street, the church bell and the other 20 people you are going to work with”, says Gordon. “But now it’s determined by the railway that arrives once a day.”
Eventually, Madras Time was established across the country in 1905, with only a few holdouts remaining.
In the early 20th century, scientific associations pushed to calibrate India’s time with GMT.
The Royal Society in London has proposed two time zones for India, both with increments of a full hour relative to GMT: six hours ahead of GMT for the east and five hours for the west of the country.
This recommendation was rejected by the colonial government, which opted for a unified time that fell exactly in the middle: five and a half hours ahead of GMT.
“It seems to me like something typical of the colonial mentality,” says Gordon.
And so, in 1906, the British rulers of India introduced what is now known as Indian Standard Time.
In 2015, North Korea established its own time zone to differentiate itself from South Korea. Wong Maye-E/AP
The politics of time
Although the 30-minute difference is a holdover from India’s colonial past, some countries have changed their own time zones more recently.
In 2007, Venezuela’s former president, Hugo Chávez, set clocks back half an hour so school-age children could have more hours of daylight, a move that was later reversed by current leader Nicolas Maduro.
In 2015, North Korea fell out of sync with South Korea by creating “Pyongyang Time,” putting the country eight and a half hours ahead of GMT instead of nine.
However, India’s time zone decision-making in the colonial era reflected a chorus of political, scientific and commercial voices, both inside and outside the government, says Gordon.
He compares the India of this period to “Brazil”, the dark and dystopian 1985 science fiction film directed by Terry Gilliam, or to the comical and complicated contraptions designed by the American cartoonist Rube Goldberg.
“It’s an incredibly haphazard, Rube Goldberg-style construction that is constructed through many different inputs, many people acting opportunistically, many people acting naively,” he adds. “There was a lot of strangeness and madness.”
A tourist walks along the Greenwich Meridian in London. Newscast/Shutterstock
The consequences of a single time zone
India’s single time zone has been the subject of much debate over the years, with people in the northeast demanding a separate time zone given the country’s size.
However, this problem is not exclusive to India: geographically, China is the third largest country in the world and continues to have only one time zone, which, according to a 2014 study, symbolizes the state’s centralized control over daily life. of people.
The National Physics Laboratory, responsible for India’s official timekeeping, even called for two separate time zones over this issue, citing reports that Indian time was “severely affecting” the lives of people in the northeast of the country.
Instead, it proposed two time zones: five and a half hours ahead of GMT for one side of India and six and a half hours for the other, specifically what they described as “far northeastern regions”, including areas such as Assam and Arunachal Pradesh.
“Despite geographic differences – such as the fact that the sun rises and sets almost two hours earlier in the northeast compared to Gujarat – both regions adhere to the same time zone,” says Maulik Jagnani, assistant professor of economics at Tufts University. .
Jagnani published a widely cited paper in 2019 highlighting the impact of sunlight on natural circadian rhythms in India, with a focus on children.
“This setting affects children’s sleep patterns […] children exposed to later sunsets go to bed later,” adds Jagnani. “Fixed school and work start times do not allow for corresponding adjustments in wake-up times, which leads to reduced sleep and worse educational outcomes.”
The NPL also acknowledged this issue, adding that the impact of the circadian rhythm on health and work efficiency is linked to the “overall socioeconomic development of the region.”
However, it looks like India’s unusual time zone is here to stay. When the question of introducing two time zones was put to the Indian parliament in 2019, a government committee rejected the concept for unspecified “strategic reasons”.
Top photo: Indian shopkeepers hang wall clocks for sale in Amritsar on December 6, 2018. Narinder Nanu/AFP/Getty Images
