This has to change." The mainland United States, excluding Pacific territories and Alaska, observes four different time zones mainland Australia has three and Russia has nine - although China uses just one.īut previous proposals to set up separate time zones in India have fallen on deaf ears. You can't have a same time zone for a country like India which is so vast. "Then I came to college and I couldn't change my habits. "In the village we used to go to bed at seven in the evening and rise at two or three in the morning," he said. Some of Assam's plantations still operate on their own time - known locally as "tea garden time" and a hangover from the days of British rule. But Bahrua says most have switched to IST, meaning the back-breaking work of picking tea begins when the sun is nearing its hottest.Īkhil Ranjan Dutta, a politics professor at Guwahati University in Assam, says he only became aware of the problem when he moved from the countryside to the state capital for his studies. "Slowly they are becoming aware of the rest of the world, and when they realise they have literally been kept in the dark, of course they feel alienated."īahrua grew up on a tea plantation in Assam state, where work started at 6:00 am to make the most of the daylight. "People are not fools," said Bahrua, a northeasterner who has campaigned for decades for a separate time zone for the region. Worse, campaigner Jahnu Barua believes a policy that was intended to unite a newly-independent India has actually exacerbated the sense of alienation in the northeast, a tribal-dominated region battling myriad separatist insurgencies. "A person is fresher (in the morning), but by the time you go at office at 10 o'clock you have lost that energy."
"Definitely there is a loss of energy, a loss of workable hours," says Arup Kumar Datta, a writer in the northeastern state of Assam who has campaigned on the issue.
Around the summer solstice, the sun rises at 4.15 am in the far northeast - a good 90 minutes before dawn breaks on India's west coast - and sets at just 6.15 pm.Ĭampaigners say that has held back the development of the region, home to some of India's poorest states, hitting productivity and adding billions to the cost of lighting homes and offices.