India's Single Time Zone: A Look At Its History

India is approximately 3,000 kilometres (1,864 mi) in length and covers around 30 degrees of longitude from east to west. This translates into a two-hour difference in mean solar timings, which measure time according to the sun's location in the sky. However, the country only has a single time zone and it is a legacy of British rule, as per a report in the BBC.

The Indian time zone is nine hours and thirty minutes ahead of New York, five hours and thirty minutes ahead of London and three hours and thirty minutes behind Tokyo. Notably, India's clocks have failed to account for the entire hour when determining any time difference it may have with other nations for over a century. India is one of just a few countries and regions that share that 30-minute difference in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), along with Iran, Myanmar, and some parts of Australia.

The sun rises nearly two hours earlier in the east of India than in the west. Many people have wondered how the time zone was decided for the diverse region. India's half-hour zone began during the colonial era when the world was getting closer due to the introduction of steamships and railroads, according to CNN. Like much of the world, India had localised schedules up to the 19th century, which frequently varied not just from city to city but even from village to village. However, the East India Company progressively took over control of huge portions of the subcontinent and by 1792, they were running one of the earliest observatories in Asia, located in Madras (now Chennai). Ten years later, Madras time was proclaimed to be "the basis of Indian Standard Time" by the observatory's first official astronomer. However, it needed a few decades, the development of steam-powered locomotives, and the East India Company's business interests, to make it work.

Geoff Gordon, a researcher at the University of Amsterdam told CNN, "The railroads had immense sway over the colonial powers. Before the railroads won the contest for Madras time, there was a contest among the powerful cities - Bombay, Kolkata. That fight didn't last long."

Meanwhile, several discussions across the world, motivated by the need to enhance sea navigation and better coordinate transcontinental train traffic, resulted in the creation of the first international time zones during a meeting in Washington DC, in 1884. The Greenwich Meridian, a line of longitude that passes through London's Greenwich Observatory and extends north to south, served as the foundation for the zones. In hourly stages, time zones east of the Meridian are normally later than Greenwich Mean Time.

However, the adoption of the system was a slow process. Madras Time was still a source of contention in India. Although the nation's trains adopted the time, local communities and labour unions opposed it, refusing to have strict new timings forced upon them.

"There's less room to maneuver as your working rhythms are linked up no longer with your boss down the street, the church bell, and the 20 other people that you go to work with. But it's now determined by the railroad that arrives once a day," Mr Gordon added.

Madras Time was then established and adopted in India in 1905. Some scientific associations pushed for the country to calibrate India's time to GMT in the 20th century.

Two time zones- one full hour ahead of GMT and one behind it, were also suggested for India by the Royal Society in London. The first was five hours ahead of GMT for the country's west and six hours ahead of GMT for its east. However, the colonial government chose to adopt a uniform time that was five and a half hours ahead of GMT instead of following that proposal. Thus, Indian Standard Time was instituted by the British officials of India in 1906.