A favourite question of parliamentarians that has repeated, time after time, in every session of Parliament since 2002, is fittingly about time. Cutting across party lines, members from both Houses have for two decades asked the Centre at least 16 times if India proposes to have two time zones and the steps taken to implement it.
First raised in March 2002, the question was effectively settled in August of that year. “No,” then Minister of State for Science and Technology Bachi Singh Rawat told Rajya Sabha Member M. Sankaralingam.
A ‘High Level Committee’ (HLC) constituted by the Department of Science and Technology in that year had studied the issue and concluded that multiple zones could cause ‘difficulties’ that would disrupt the smooth functioning of the “airlines, Railways, radio, television and telephone services” and so it was best to continue with a unified time, said Mr. Rawat.
