Guwahati:
After 66 years of being on the Indian Standard Time or IST,
Assam has decided to follow garden time or a daylight-saving schedule
British tea planters introduced more than 150 years ago.
Preparations
are underway in the north-eastern state to advance clocks an hour ahead
of the standard time followed across the country.
"Such a time
zone already exists in tea gardens . People will become more energetic
and we will save on energy consumption too," state chief minister Tarun
Gogoi said.
The government says the logic is simple: in Assam and
other north-eastern states, sunrise happens as early as 5 am and it is
pitch dark by 5 pm in the winters and a little later in the summers.
So
sticking to IST means a loss of daylight hours and a decrease in
productivity. For instance, a farmer in Assam is ready to work a good
one hour before her or his counterpart in a state like Gujarat.
Robin
Borthakur, former secretary of the Indian Tea Association, speaks of
the tradition of advancing clocks at Assam's tea gardens. "This concept
started because day light breaks earlier than other parts of India. That
is why the time was decided," he says.
The IST is based on the
local time at Uttar Pradesh's Allahabad. But people like filmmaker Jahnu
Baruah, who has campaigned for a different time zone for the north-east
for long, says this just doesn't hold good for them.
"I had
being talking about this for almost 25 years. India is a vast country;
the difference between eastern border and western border is two hours.
We are wasting too much productivity. I have calculated the north-east
itself we went behind in productivity by 25 years," Mr Baruah says.
Assam's
move, which may need the central government's go ahead, is also likely
to rekindle an old debate about having different time zones across the
country, or advancing India's clocks to 6 hours instead of
five-and-a-half hours according to the Greenwich Mean Time or GMT.
Experts say this will take care of all time differences across the
country.
http://www.ndtv.com/article/india/india-gets-its-second-time-zone-as-assam-turns-its-clock-ahead-by-an-hour-466326