Government mandates IST as sole time reference for digital, commercial & legal systems

New Delhi, Jun 19 (KNN) In a decisive move to unify India’s timekeeping, the Union government has announced that Indian Standard Time (IST) will soon become the mandatory time reference across all legal, commercial, digital, and administrative domains.

This policy, dubbed “One Nation, One Time,” was unveiled on June 18 by Union Minister Pralhad Joshi and formalised on June 19 with official directives, reported TOI. 

Under the upcoming Legal Metrology (Indian Standard Time) Rules, 2025, systems that currently rely on foreign sources—such as GPS—will be required to switch to IST, unless explicitly authorised otherwise.

Key sectors to comply include banks, stock exchanges, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), utility providers, telecom networks, transportation services, and critical infrastructure operators.  

Officials emphasise that this shift aims not just at aligning clocks, but at enhancing accuracy, security, and synchronization for time-stamped activities—ranging from digital transactions and utility billing to incident logging in transportation and telecom networks.  

The government is setting up a robust infrastructure for time dissemination, featuring five regional atomic-clock labs in Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Bhubaneswar, Faridabad, and Guwahati.

These centres will distribute IST with millisecond to microsecond precision via secure protocols like NTP and PTP.  

While an exact compliance deadline hasn’t been announced, Joshi confirmed that the rules will be notified “very shortly,” and a series of stakeholder consultations—including a round‑table with banks, exchanges, railways, and telecoms—was held ahead of the formal rollout.  

(KNN Bureau)