by Nine hours and 30 minutes ahead of New York. Five hours and 30 minutes ahead of London. Three hours and 30 minutes behind Tokyo.
For over a century, India’s clocks have officially fallen by the full hour to account for any time difference it had with most countries.
And while it is part of a small group of nations and territories that share that 30-minute gap – including Iran, Myanmar and parts of Australia – India is perhaps the most likely outlier.
The huge South Asian nation geographically spans two time zones that would normally be, but much to the frustration of some groups, it sticks to its unusual clock settings, refusing to part ways with a system that has a very complicated history.
India’s half time zone dates back to India’s colonial rule and the era when steamships and faster trains shrunk the world.
Until the 19th century, India – like most parts of the world – operated on very localized times, which often differed not only from city to city, but from village to village. But the East India Company, a ruthless and powerful British-owned trading organization that gradually seized control of large parts of the subcontinent, played a central role in the background.
The East India Company was managing one of the first observatories in Asia, in Madras (now known as Chennai) by 1792. Ten years later, the first official astronomer at this observatory declared that Madras was “the cornerstone of Standard Time Indian”.
It took a few decades, with the advent of steam locomotives and the commercial interests of the East India Company to make that stick, however.
“The railways had a huge impact on the colonial powers,” says Geoff Gordon, a senior researcher in public international law at the University of Amsterdam.
“Before the railways won the competition for Madras time, there was competition among the powerful cities – Bombay, Kolkata,” says Gordon. “That fight didn’t last long.”
Meanwhile, the first international time zones were established at a conference in Washington DC in 1884 due to similar debates around the world, driven by the need to better coordinate transcontinental rail travel and improve maritime navigation.
The zones were based around the Greenwich Meridian, a line of longitude that runs north-south through the Greenwich Observatory in London. Time zones east of the Meridian are usually later than Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) in hourly increments.
It took some time for the system to be accepted globally. In India, people were still arguing over Madras Time. Despite the fact that the country’s railways accepted the time, it was opposed by workers and local communities who were not happy to impose new strict times on them.
“There’s less room for maneuver because your work rhythms are no longer tied to your boss down the street, the church bell, and the other 20 people you go to work with,” says Gordon. “But it’s now fixed by the railroad that comes once a day.”
Eventually, Madras Time was established across the country by 1905, with only a few holdings remaining.
In the early 20th century there was pressure from scientific societies to calibrate India’s time to GMT.
The Royal Society in London proposed two time zones for India, in full time increments from GMT and each other: Six hours ahead of GMT for the east and five hours for the west of the country.
That proposal was rejected by the colonial government, which opted for a unified time that sat squarely in the middle: five and a half hours ahead of GMT.
“It strikes me as 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.
The politics of the time
Although the 30-minute difference is a persistent relic of India’s colonial past, some countries have recently changed their own time zones.
Former Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez set back half an hour in 2007 to give schoolchildren more daylight hours, a move that was later reversed by current leader Nicolas Maduro.
In 2015, North Korea moved out of sync with South Korea by creating “Pyongyang Time”, putting the country eight and a half hours ahead of GMT instead of nine.
India’s time zone decision-making, however, reflected a chorus of political, scientific and commercial voices within and outside government, says Gordon.
He compares India during this period to “Brazil,” the dark dystopian sci-fi fantasy film from 1985 directed by Terry Gilliam, or the comically complex contraptions drawn by US cartoonist Rube Goldberg.
“It’s just this really haphazard Rube Goldberg-esque construction, built up through a lot of different inputs, a lot of people acting opportunistically, a lot of people acting naively,” he says. “It was a lot of weird and wild.”
The consequences of a single time zone
India’s single time zone has been the subject of much debate in recent years, with populations in the northeast demanding a separate time zone given how vast the country is.
Although this problem is not unique to India: geographically, China is the third largest country in the world and yet has only one time zone, which a 2014 study argues is symbolic of the state’s centralized control of people’s daily lives.
India’s official timekeeper, the National Physical Laboratory, even called for two separate time zones over the issue, citing reports that Indian time was “severely interfering” with the lives of people in the northeast.
Two time zones were proposed instead: five and a half hours ahead of GMT on one side of India, and six and a half hours on the other, specifically what they described as the “far northeastern region,” with including areas like Assam and Arunachal Pradesh. .
“Despite geographical differences – such as the sun rising and setting 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 the University Tufts.
Jagnani published a widely cited paper in 2019 highlighting the influence of sunlight on natural circadian rhythms in India, with a focus on children.
“This arrangement affects children’s sleep patterns […] children exposed to later sunsets go to sleep later,” says Jagnani. “Set school and work start times do not allow for corresponding adjustments in waking times, resulting in reduced sleep and poorer educational outcomes.”
The NPL also recognized this issue, adding that the impact of the circadian rhythm on health and work efficiency is linked to “the overall socio-economic development of the region”.
However, it seems that 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 on unspecified “strategic reasons”.
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