- India
- Sep 03
- Sreesha V.M
Govt notifies rules for ‘One Nation, One Time’
• The government of India has notified the Legal Metrology (Indian Standard Time) Rules, 2026, marking a significant step towards establishing Indian Standard Time (IST) as the common, legally recognised and traceable time reference for the country.
• The initiative supports the government’s vision of ‘One Nation, One Time’, ensuring that critical sectors and digital systems across the country operate with a common and reliable time reference.
• The Legal Metrology (LM) Department under the Ministry of Consumer Affairs (MoCA) is the regulatory and enforcement authority under the Legal Metrology framework.
• The CSIR-National Physical Laboratory (CSIR-NPL), India’s National Metrology Institute, provides the scientific foundation and traceability for IST.
• The Rules will come into force after six months.
• At present, several systems use foreign satellite-based time sources. The development of an Indian time dissemination infrastructure will provide additional options for critical systems and reduce dependence on external time sources.
• The Rules provide for the use of NavIC, India’s satellite navigation system, and other approved Indian timing sources for reliable and secure time dissemination.
The need for a common time reference
• Accurate and synchronised time is fundamental to modern digital and critical infrastructure.
• Telecommunications, financial transactions and digital payments, power grids, transportation, data centres, government information systems and other critical services depend on accurate time synchronisation and reliable time stamps.
The common time reference will support:
i) Accurate time-stamping of banking and digital payment transactions.
ii) Coordination of railways, airports and other transport systems.
iii) Reliable operation of telecommunication and internet networks.
iv) Accurate time-keeping in power systems.
v) Maintenance of government and legal records.
vi) Coordination of emergency and other time-sensitive services.
National custodian of Indian Standard Time
• CSIR-NPL is the National Metrology Institute (NMI) of India with the mandate to set up primary national standards and to disseminate them.
• It maintains India’s national atomic time scale generating IST using an ensemble of atomic clocks and primary frequency standard.
• IST is continuously kept traceable, within a few nanoseconds, to the international reference time known as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), maintained by the International Bureau of Weights and Measures (BIPM).
• CSIR-NPL, ISRO and the Department of Legal Metrology established secondary timescales at five Regional Reference Standard Laboratories (RRSLs) located at Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Bhubaneswar, Faridabad and Guwahati.
• These secondary time scales are continuously traceable to IST maintained by CSIR-NPL, thus creating a distributed national architecture for reliable dissemination of IST.
• CSIR-NPL also provides traceability of IST to ISRO for the NavIC system, enabling satellite-based dissemination of Indian Standard Time and strengthening the availability and resilience of national timing services.
(The author is a trainer for Civil Services aspirants.)