Indian time, as anyone who has waited for a train to arrive or an event to start will know, is stretchable.

Now a group of scientists is taking the popular saying to a literal level by proposing that the country’s official time, until now an enduring legacy of British colonialism, should be pushed forward by half an hour.

The move, they say, will yield about 10 billion rupees (£121 million) a year in energy cost savings as a result of a 16 per cent reduction in evening peak-time electricity use.

The proposal that India should adopt a time six hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time instead of the current five and a half hours, will be put to the Government by three professors from the National Institute of Advanced Studies.

Their research paper, published in Current Science magazine last month, concludes that an extra half hour of daylight will bring substantial benefits besides energy savings, including a reduction in road accidents and street crime, increased outdoor activities and shopping, and fewer sports matches being stopped because of bad light.

A political upside would be to help bring India’s troubled northeast region, a hotbed of separatist tendencies, by bringing its working day more into line with the rest of the country. In the height of summer, the sun there rises before 4am and in the winter sets as early as 4.25pm.

Shifting the time forward would give the region on average an extra hour of daylight a day, the paper said. The new time zone would be calculated at 90ºE, near the border of the states of West Bengal and Assam.

“Advancing IST will continue to save expensive evening energy, increasing year after year with increasing domestic consumption,” the paper said. The scientists estimate that the transition to a new time zone could be made within two years. The researchers also pointed out that only 5 per cent of the world chose to have a fractional time difference from GMT rather than rounding up or down to the nearest hour. The move would mean India conforming with the majority of countries.

The benefits would outweigh disadvantages such as later winter sunrises, affecting children on their way to school, and India’s flagship IT services industry being half an hour farther removed from big clients in the US, according to the paper’s co-authors, DP Sen Gupta, Dilip Ahuja and V. Agrawal.

It is not the first time that India has considered changing its time zone, which was established in 1802 by John Goldingham, the first astronomer of the East India Company in Madras.

In the 1980s a team of energy researchers proposed splitting the country into two or three time zones along the lines of British rule, which meant one time in Bombay and another in Calcutta, 39 minutes later. The recommendation was not adopted.

In 2004 a government-appointed committee’s proposals for multiple time zones and daylight-saving were rejected by parliament for fear it would threaten India’s cohesion. Except for a brief hiatus during wars with Pakistan and China in the 1960s, modern India has observed a single large time zone. The latest proposal would need Cabinet approval. Its chances of being seriously considered are strengthened by India’s need for energy to fuel its economic boom.

Odd clocks

–– 15 degrees of longitude on a map usually constitutes one hour time difference

–– Christ Church College, Oxford sets all its clocks five minutes and two seconds behind GMT. This so-called ‘Oxford Time’ is calculated on the basis that the university is around 50 miles west of the Prime Meridian at Greenwich

–– The only place where a person can simultaneously occupy three separate time zones at once is the meeting point of the borders of Norway, Russia and Finland

–– The largest time change while crossing a single border is three and a half hours, between the far west of China and Afghanistan. This happens because although China spans five time zones, the whole country functions on a single time: that of Beijing in the East

Sources: Oxford University, wwp.greenwichmeantime.com

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