The Centre is set to mandate the use of Indian Standard Time for all legal, commercial, digital and administrative activities and will be notifying formal rules for the same shortly. This move will reduce India’s reliance on foreign time sources such as GPS, ensure more secure digital transactions, accurate billing in utilities, reduced cybercrime risks and synchronised timekeeping in transportation and communication.

While the country has currently one time zone, multiple systems in India rely on external time sources. Time will be derived via NavIC ( Navigation with Indian Constellation), which is India’s independent regional navigation satellite system.

Speaking to reporters, Union Minister for Consumer Affairs, Food & Public Distribution Pralhad Joshi emphasised on the strategic significance of the Time Dissemination Project being implemented by the department in collaboration with CSIR-NPL and ISRO. He added that precise and uniform dissemination of IST across sectors such as financial markets, power grids, telecommunications, transportation and others are essential to ensuring fairness, accuracy and national security.

He said the upcoming rules will mandate synchronisation of all legal, commercial, digital and administrative activities with IST, “prohibiting the use of alternative time references unless explicitly authorised”.

Notification soon

To make Indian Standard Time (IST) mandatory, the government will soon notify Legal Metrology (Indian Standard Time) Rules, 2025. The draft rules were issued in January 2025 for stakeholders’ feedback. “We are notifying the rules. In that, we are now One Nation One Time... These rules will be mandated very shortly. Exact date will be decided at a later stage,” Joshi he added.

“In today’s data-driven world, the un-synchronised clocks lead to digital mismatches, investigation challenges and network inefficiencies. Several systems currently rely on foreign timing sources like GPS, posing the risk of cyber attacks, inconsistency and non-traceable time stamps,” he said.

This project addresses a long-standing gap of institutionalising the IST as the official legal time of India, Joshi added.

“Since we have decided to implement and notify these rules...and that is going to be mandatory, we had a round table conference of all stakeholders...,” he said adding that “very shortly, IST will be a reality. We will have our own time”.

The Consumer Affairs Ministry on Wednesday held a roundtable with over 100 stakeholders from sectors including telecom, banking, railways and financial services among others on the issue.

Nidhi Khare, secretary, Department of Consumer Affairs, said: “Precise and synchronised time is fundamental to the functioning of both strategic and non-strategic sectors in the country. So far, we were dependent on external sources for time dissemination. We have Indigenised the entire ecosystem of time and the department is now ready with the dissemination process.”

She added that under the Time Dissemination Project, the department in collaboration with CSIR-NPL and ISRO is establishing an advanced infrastructure comprising five Regional Reference Standard Laboratories (RRSLs) in Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Bhubaneswar, Faridabad, and Guwahati. These centres are being equipped with atomic clocks and secure synchronization systems using Network Time Protocol (NTP) and Precision Time Protocol (PTP) to ensure millisecond to microsecond accuracy.

She stated that the implementation of these rules would be a crucial step toward ensuring traceability, enhancing operational reliability and fostering national time sovereignty. The initiative is a major step in building a trusted and standardised digital ecosystem across the country, she added.

“For the common man, this initiative translates into more secure digital transactions, accurate billing in utilities, reduced cybercrime risks and synchronised timekeeping in transportation and communication, ensuring fairness, transparency, and trust in day-to-day services,” an official statement said.

Published on June 18, 2025