India needs economic growth and that too a high rate of growth for a long period of 20-30 years to make us a supremely developed economy. Being the world’s second most populous country, it’s a gigantic task for any government to do so. In human history only China has been able to achieve it, but China enjoyed some unique advantages like a One party government, free market globalization promoted by western economies before Brexit and Trump that took away millions of their manufacturing jobs, lack of modern tools like Automation and 3-D printing which are going to take away repetitive low-end jobs in factories.
India is a complex democracy which needs to make it’s own solutions than copying it’s eastern neighbour. Also since most of the development activities take time and the Governments are changed before their actins can bear fruit, we need some bold moves like demonetisation which will cause pain for us for a few days but the results can be expected in a much faster turn around time.
One such bold move is advancing the IST by 30 minutes.
If we see the Indian map we can see the most backward states in the country falling in the eastern part of the country. It should also be noted that the eastern states of UP, Bihar and West Bengal carry nearly 1/3rd population of the country. With Assam, Orissa, Jharkhand and the 7 sisters in North East adding another 12 crore in population making the entire region with a population of roughly 52 crore. Well some can say that most of UP falls west of IST it can’t be argued that poverty is more prevalent in the eastern parts of the state like Varanasi, Gorakhpur, Azamgarh etc. It should also be noted that this entire region has only one city i.e. Kolkata among the top 10 cities in India, with 9 of them falling in the western part of IST. To be precise, some urgent actions are to be needed by the Government of India to develop the eastern part along with the rest of the country to maintain a proper regional balance.
Advancing the IST by 30 minutes is one such solution by which we can hope to add some extra daylight into these states and the country as a whole can save 2.3 billion units of energy per year according to a study by National Institute of Advanced Studies(NIAS) professor D.P. Sengupta & Dilip Ahuja. Load shedding is most common during evening hours across the country and advancing the clock by 30 minutes once is hardly going to change the habits of people who will now use more of sunlight and less of energy. Our daily waking hours will be more aligned to the sunshine cycle and people will start to sleep early saving us a lot of power. Let’s take a look at the possible advantages of this step:-
1.Extra energy saved can be immediately distributed to the backward regions of the country since any additional effort isn’t required on the part of Government to produce it.
2.Electrification of 100% villages in the country with an uninterrupted source of power is one of the major infrastructure push that will take the country towards development.
3.It would help the Eastern and Northeastern states to get rid of their lazy tags as people’s productivity is linked to sunlight. We don’t turn our lamps for the evening by seeing the clock but by observing the sunlight. Specially in villages and small towns people just rush to their home after it’s dark outside. Buses and other transport facilities connecting these small towns also avoid certain routes after it’s dark hampering the overall productivity.
4.Whereas although the sun sets up at 5:30 or latest by 6 people are forced to stay in bed till 7 as their office starts from 10 AM only. Wasting precious daylight resources.
5.It would help North East India to match it’s time with it’s immediate neighbours like Bhutan and Bangladesh and to some extent Myanmar which will assist the government efforts to open up International transit in these routes. The ports of Bangladesh can be hugely beneficial to the region plus the linking of railways in the Kolkata-Agartala route and connecting of surface transport via Dhaka-Shillong-Guwahati route will be immensely beneficial for the region.
6.Night times are often related to dark activities like Alcoholism, Street crimes and traffic accidents which can also be cut down to some extent.
The main thing in the entire process is that it comes at no extra cost to the Government or people and once it has been done people will forget in the due course of time that we ever have advanced our clocks by 30 minutes bringing long-term benefits to the country.
