Need for Bangalore Daylight Savings Time??

I had never really gathered a complete picture of the Daylight Savings Time(DST) till I got to read this post by SG at : http://sowmyagopal.blogspot.com/2009/10/around-clock.html
Thanks, SG.

I had this email that American clock is 13.5 hours behind IST and our official meeting hours with our US counterparts will change accordingly. I did not bother much. Such messages are common twice a year in all IT companies.

Day before yesterday, when I stepped out of office, it was a cloudy sky, but never thought that it will be pitch dark at 6:00P.M. I have waited for three days to see if I have to make this patentable proposition of having a DST declared for Bangalore and call it " The Bangalore Daylight Savings Time (BDST)".

I don't wake up very early, so I do not know if it dawns early these days, but I must say night sky sets in very early these days - as early as 6:00P.M. Complimenting the dark skies is the heavy November downpour. I don't know what's with rains and traffic jam in Bangalore; the traffic jam is too heavy even by Bangalore standards. So, if you start off from work as usual, say around 5:00P.M or 5:30P.M, you are bound to get netted in the painfully slow moving traffic or worse still, deadlocked traffic. You just cannot move. It is raining and you are on a bike and you are locked in the traffic. When you reach home, it is invariably 7:00P.M; at the earliest, so to say.

I got caught in rain day before and with no auto to take me back home, I had to walk up to the nearest sunshade of a shop to shelter my head from getting wet. ( Don't blame me for not carrying an umbrella!! I heard it at least ten times from five people that day!!!) With nothing better to do, I watched the interesting scene in front of me:
My shelter was close to a cross road facing the main road.. Water is gushing one cross road to the main road's walkway. It looked like a river to me. That is my usual route, so I knew how many trenches are open on that walk way. With water gushing like an overflowing river, walkers need to know what they are walking into.

Attention shift: A biker stops his vehicle and rushes to take shelter with the other three of us waiting there. There was a deadlock in traffic. No one could move. All cars and bikes were honking and no one can move an inch because of the gushing water and haphazardly organized vehicular traffic. It was like a race on cross roads where vehicles from four sides of the roads were trying to hit the finish line which was the center of the road in this case!! Sure shot accidents!!!..

Headlights beaming, persistent honking conveying the urgency of each one to get past the other, confused pedestrians, over flowing rain water, all made the scene seem hopeless. As far as I could see on all sides, there were only vehicles... No sight of a moving vehicle.

I thought about the cause for this situation. Everyone starts from work at about the same time, plus or minus a few minutes though. Then,mid way it gets dark, rainy and all of them want to get home before they catch a cold or fever.

The only way, it seemed to me, to avoid this hassle is to start from work early evening ( say 4:00 P.M), for which people have to be in at 8:00 A.M. That is what I meant by BDST. We need to make the best use of the early morning hours till November and through the winter days in Bangalore, which is early February. It will help a lot of traffic issues.

Also, the metro work and electrical conduits and anything else I have no clue about, seems to have some trench dug up on the pavements, almost always. With less or no light at all, imagine the plight of old pedestrians. On a particularly busy junction on the 80 Ft Road, there is some work going on. It was 6:00P.M. No street light. Rainy evening. The dug up land has turned into a marshy area. Imagine an old man walking his way from the church nearby..... Who is going to tell the concerned people, that there are some falls when Sorry does not help repair the effects?

Can't avoid the early dusk, Can't stop the rainfall, Can't stop constructions, Can't stop digging roads and pavements, Can't do anything about proper rain water routing and harvest or drain, but the one thing that must work is we finish our business outside early and get home before the night fall/rain fall/traffic peak.

Comments

Musing Gal said…
Dew Drop.. What you are proposing to India is nice, start early to avoid traffic and stuff, but we can do that even now without any requirement to change the timings if just the IT world and companies change their work timings in witner :) , but ..My 2 cents here... In US the time now is not the DST, it is the normal time. In winter there is no day light savings. It works the other way. In summer they save electricity by using the Sun more, by moving their clock to an hour early so they can have an extended day till 8:00 pm or so. But in India days are pretty much the same most of the times. Here the Sun sets by 4:00 pm in winter, but they do not start the day early in Winter :). Your idea can apply to US too in this aspect!
SK said…
நல்லா கெளப்புறாங்கையா பீதிய :-)

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