Indian Standard Time

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Image:WikiprojectIndiacities allahabad.png Indian Standard Time (IST) is the time zone for India. It is 5 hours and 30 minutes ahead of GMT/UTC ([[UTC+5:30]]).

The Indian Standard Time is calculated from the Allahabad observatory. Allahabad has 82.5 °E longitude which corresponds to an exact 5 hours and 30 minutes difference between India and Greenwich, the reference point for GMT.

The entire country shares the same time. Although using one time universally has its advantages, the drawback is that in places in the far east, the sun rises about two hours early, while in the west it rises late (and sets late). Another temporal inconsistency arises because parts of India lie east of Bangladesh which observes [[UTC+6]] as standard time. Thus, flying from, say, Assam to West Bengal requires moving clocks forward and backward by half an hour as one passes over Bangladesh.

India's time zones were established in 1884, when there were two standard time zones, Bombay Time and Calcutta Time. The IST came into effect in 1905. However, Bombay still persisted with its own time zone, 39 minutes behind IST, until 1955.

Currently India does not observe daylight saving time, though it was used during the Sino-Indian War (1962), the Indo-Pakistani War of 1965 and the Indo-Pakistani War of 1971.