Pradeep's Space Blog
on my journey in getting people off the planet

India going ahead in time?

There are three ways of time-keeping. One is called mean time – one time for all the people in a country or they can have different time zones and one of the latest introductions being the Daylight saving. India keeps time by looking at the Indian Standard Time or IST which runs along the 82.5 E latitude or +5.5 hours UTC.

A study undertaken by Dilip R. Ahuja, D. P. Sen Gupta of the National Institute of Advanced Studies and V. K. Agrawal of Southern Regional Load Dispatch Centre have made a study titled, “Energy savings from advancing the Indian Standard Time by half an hour” which was published in the August 10 issue of Current Science magazine.

The paper, as the title suggests, proposes the advancing of the IST by half an hour to being six hours ahead of Universal Co-ordinated Time (UTC). The primary benefits being a saving in peak load electricity of nearly 16%.

The other two proposals that came in before this suggested the division of India into two time zones. But, problem arises as to where the dividing line will be as most of India is densely populated. These were turned down as the risks were not justifiable for the (lack of?) benefits.

But, what this study really uncovers is the lack of statistical data available for making such studies more precise. It also presents to us the needs of maintaining such data. In light of this, I would believe that the next 5 years be spent on recording such data that may prove conclusively which is a better option.

Read the paper for more details.
 

Posted at 11:27AM Sep 07, 2007 by Pradeep in Space in India  |  Comments[1]