'The IST story-How Indian Railways, and Sardar Patel, helped synchronise India’s clocks'
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- Опубліковано 26 вер 2024
- Several requests have been made to have a separate time zone for the eastern region to leverage daylight-savings schedule. It's time for India to at least discuss the pros and cons. Watch Sanjeev Chopra, former IAS officer explain in his this week's column
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India definitely needs 2 timezones. The suggestion about using Plantation time for govt and schools as a stop gap measure sounds plausible for the time being.
Thank you for sharing very informative
Learned Senior IAS officer Mr. Sanjeev Chopra has given interesting, information packed, excellently researched discourse on How Indian Railways, and Sardar Patel, helped synchronize India’s clocks. He has enlightened me about the contribution Iron Man Sardar Patel, Indian Railways and Bombay Municipal Corporation’s role in synchronizing clocks in India with local time of Allahabad [now Prayagraj] as Indian Standard Time. He also enlightened me with fascinating and historic fact that Legendary Prime Minister of India Lal Bahadur Shastri was residing at Zero Road in Allahabad [now Prayagraj]. He has most correctly observed that it is better to change office time seasonally instead of turning the clock hands backwards or forward. He has chronicled the history chronometry and horology in short but most apt manner.
Thanks for this 🙏🏻
Very interesting History of Indian Time!
Sorry, the longitude of Allahabad is 81.8463 E. and not 82.5 E. The IST was rounded based on the time difference between Greenwich and Madras (5 hours 21 minutes rounded to 5 hours 30 minutes)!!!
Thanks.. suggestion noted
India is among a handful of countries of its size that does not have multiple time zones. Typically countries of India's size have 2 or even 3 time zones.
People will still not be punctual.
Very informative 😊
Thank you Sir for the research and putting it across to us,looking forward to listening more about our history. A small correction, don't wish to do a Gayatri Spivak 😅 but I too used to pronounce Green wich the way you did till I was corrected,its pronounced as grehnich.Regards.
I think there is a certain logic to pronouncing English words and names in the Indian way. If they could butcher Kanpur into Cawnpore and Triruvananthapuram into Trivandrum, Indians should feel free to call it Green-witch.
very interesting
Informative but Jabalpur was never a provincial capital. It was Nagpur
Interesting! You need to be crisper with facts. Allahabad is not 82.5 degrees East. It is not even 82 degrees East. There is no town of consequence at 82.5 degrees East. The closest is Mirzapur. Also, Bangladesh is half an hour ahead of IST, not one hour as you state.
Today, this adherence to half hour intervals from GMT, implemented across the world, makes sense because both transportation and communications require simplicity. In British colonial times, intercontinental travel was measured in weeks or months. Since the 1960s, it has been measured in hours. Since one crosses many time zones and could land in any one of several, we began to require some simplicity and standardisation. Intercontinental communication in the form of telephone calls also became popular around this time and one needed to estimate what the time would be in the destination location without having to look up pages of data.
Today of course, we all use devices that can easily be made to tell us the exact time in any location in the world, irrespective of whether it is a half hour multiple away from GMT or not but we seem to have got used to the half hour (or on occasion, 15 minute) multiple format.
On the issue of multiple time zones, you have mentioned France, Russia and USA but have ignored China. China has only one time zone, corresponding to 120 degrees East (or 8 hours ahead of GMT). This is despite the fact that its political borders span from the borders with Tajikistan and Pakistan (at around 75 degrees East or 5 hours ahead of GMT) till the border with Russia near Khabarovsk (near Vladivostok), which is almost 135 degrees East or 9 hours ahead of GMT, a difference of 4 hours from West to East. The real problem in China is to get people in say, Harbin, or even Beijing to call up someone in say, Kashgar and find him at his desk. This is a problem we also face in India, especially if we try to call offices in Dibrugarh, Tinsukia or Digboi after say 4 pm IST.
Of course, given intercontinental communication (common in the Indian Private Sector, especially between USA and India), most phone calls during office hours in USA find us fast asleep in India and vice versa.
India should have 3 -4 time zones
US is 3 times the size and even more in breadth. They have 4. At most India can have 2
One correction: Bangladeshi time is 30 minutes ahead of India and not 1 hour ahead
Why not have 4 official time zones?
1 for Andaman
1 for north east
1 central India
1 west
More aligned with the sun
Jai sree Ram 😊
Fascinating, but I think Mr. Chopra means that the three presidencies all used a geographically local time, which is why it differed from GMT by those odd amounts. Second, it is worth noting that in the US also, there were many different local times, and it was the railways that necessitated a standardization. Finally, this is another pagdi on Sardar Patel's head.