Indian time to soon be truly standardised

India is seeking to legalise “Indian Standard Time,” which means all service providers across the country will have to take time from the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), the official timekeeper of the nation, as India becomes more serious about security and cautious about cyber-attacks (both areas where a fraction of a second could be critical).

Currently, for hundreds of millions of Indians using Microsoft software or iPhones, the time on their devices is likely sourced from Network Time Protocol servers based in the US.

“It (the time) differs by one to several seconds for users, depending on where it is sourced from. In most cases, this is from the US-based servers or GPS, which is also a US-owned technology,” said Dinesh K Aswal, director, NPL. Once IST becomes legal, users will not be allowed to use any other time other than the time generated by NPL.

“When it comes to security, including defence and The National Physical Laboratory in Delhi has two types of precise atomic clocks — five Caesium clocks and one Active Hydrogen Maser An accurate Clock from Russia clock is one

that does

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cyber security, ATM and online transactions, even seconds make a difference,” Ashish Agarwal, a scientist at NPL, said.

India’s Legal Metrology Act, 2009, which provides for enforcement of standards of weights and measures and regulates trade based on these measures, does not recognise IST as the legal time of the country. The Tatkal ticketing system of Indian Railways is one way of explaining why India needs a legal synchronised time. If the railways is There is an ensemble of over 400 Caesium clocks across the world, including the five at NPL

The International Bureau of Weights and Measures is responsible for averaging the time spread across these clocks and determining the Universal Coordinated Time to ensure the start of each second is the same across the world

using IST sourced from NPL and a customer’s phone is using network time, the lack of synchronisation between the two could mean no tickets left for the customer when she logs in.

“We are pushing for nation, one time, so there is only one source of Indian Standard Time,” Agarwal added.

Currently, the Indian

Space Research Organisation, the Indian Air Force, airports and several banks use IST generated by NPL.

Before amending the Legal Metrology Act to include IST, adequate infrastructure will have to be put in place to disseminate the time.

On Wednesday, NPL signed an MoU with Hyderabad -based IFR Information Dissemination Services, which has a partnership with a German company, Europaische Funk-Rundsteuerung, to disseminate IST through two radio towers that will cover the whole country. The towers are likely to come up in about three years and will cost about ₹200 crore.

NPL says it is particularly worried that telcos do not use IST generated by NPL. “Despite disseminating IST free of cost, almost all telecom service providers and internet service providers are utilising the NTP servers synchronized to National Institutes of Standards and Technology, US,”

Aswal said.

The Centre has allocated R100 crore to the Ministry of Consumer Affairs, the ministry responsible for implementing the Legal Metrology Act, over three years for implementing time dissemination services.

NEWDELHI: