New Delhi:
A working person in India usually wakes up by the alarm clock of 7 in the morning. At 9.15 am he pays for the auto for office through UPI and at 3.30 pm he sees the latest trend of the stock market. The time on your watch will not change, but now all these tasks will run at the same second, from the same watch. The Central Government has decided to implement the Legal Metrology (Indian Standard Time) Rules, 2026 under the ‘One Nation, One Time’ initiative, which will come into effect from March 2027.
What will change for you with ‘One Nation, One Time’?
After the implementation of ‘One Nation, One Time’, you do not need to change your wrist watch or mobile watch. You will continue to travel on IST as you did earlier. The change will not happen in your watch, but in the system that relies on your watch. You can also understand this that you transferred Rs 10,000 to someone online at 11.59 pm, but the bank’s server time was 2 seconds behind, so the transaction failed or got into dispute. Or there is a difference of half a second between the time of railway ticket booking system and your phone. To eliminate these small mistakes, the government has decided that from now on every legal, administrative, banking and digital work of the country will run only on IST, the source of which will be the atomic clock of NPL Delhi.
Why did the government need ‘One Nation, One Time’?
Today our entire country depends on one second. UPI, stock exchange, 5G network, power grid, cyber security – all these demand accuracy of nano seconds. Till now many private companies and servers were dependent on America’s GPS time, which can be stopped at any time. The government says that this is not just a rule of time, but a matter of digital sovereignty and security. If the country has its own accurate and secure time source, then the scope for cyber attacks, banking fraud and data manipulation will be eliminated. If we explain the government’s point in simple words, then with ‘One Nation, One Time’ your time will remain the same, but your time will now become more secure.
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These are also challenges regarding ‘One Nation, One Time’
‘One Nation, One Time’ will not be limited to just banking and UPI, it will also help in putting criminals behind bars. Actually, time is the biggest evidence in any cyber crime, CCTV footage or digital contract. If all the systems run at the same time, then there will be no dispute regarding time in the court. Also, with this, the country’s critical infrastructure like 5G, electricity grid, air traffic control, defense network will no longer depend on foreign GPS. This will eliminate the risk of the enemy country hacking our system by GPS jamming or spoofing. This is a big step for India towards digital dependence. However, the biggest challenge is going to be that all the companies, banks, telecom operators and government departments of the country will have to connect their servers with the time server of NPL. For this, Network Team Protocol (NTP) infrastructure will have to be installed. The government has given time till March 2027 for this.
Source: ndtv.in
