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January 04, 2006

How come India is five and a half hours ahead of UTC? Isn't that not allowed?

To set the record straight, such as it needs to be, a country's timezone relative to UTC (I am too much of a geek to use GMT) is what the government of the country decides it should be. There are no international conventions or regulations that require the difference between a country's standard time and UTC to be a whole number of hours.

Now to the separate question of why India chose its timezone to be UTC+5:30 rather than UTC+5:00 or UTC+6:00. India's geographic extent spans two timezones but it chose to go with one 'half' timezone rather than two 'whole number' timezones. I am unable to find a normative reference as to why but have encountered two reasonable theories that try and explain this unusual choice:

a) The 'Head' Theory: Picking the median of the two timezones means that India does not have to implement Daylight Time. Although it's a bit of a stretch in India's extremities--especially the far east--it can pull off maintaining the same time throughout the year by picking the median of its putative standard timezone and daylight timezone. Daylight Time is in wide usage throughout the world but retains its notoriety for being the source of confusion twice a year. Presumably the standards-makers of India enacted this timezone for the convenience, or perhaps they did not want to impose the complexity of switching time twice a year on a population (then) embattled by illiteracy, poverty, hunger and other problems more fundamental than keeping time.
b) The 'Heart' Theory: India underwent a painful Partition in 1947, when it and Pakistan were granted Dominion status by the British Crown. After such a cataclysmic, nation-rending event, the government did not want to divide the country along yet another parameter.

Perhaps in the spirit of compromise advanced by the latter theory above, for what it's worth, Indian Standard Time is defined to be the local time at the Allahabad Observatory at 82.5°E, which is exactly five and a half hours ahead of UTC. Allahabad (known sometimes as Prayag), while not along the exact center-line of India, lies well in the Indian heartland. It has had a long history as a culturally sacred site and has been significant as the hometown of the Nehru family, which produced many of India's early heads of government.

If you thought India was weird in its choice of timezone, try Nepal, which maintains standard time at UTC+5:45 (no, really). India's choice of timezone also introduces weird discontinuities in standard time because the parts of India east of Bangladesh (UTC+6:00) still have a standard time of UTC+5:30. Oh, and by the way, Myanmar (UTC+6:30) and Central Australia (UTC+9:30) also have half timezones.

Posted by Vishy at January 4, 2006 10:26 PM

Comments

Posted by: Stephen at January 5, 2006 06:23 AM