In today’s Finshots, we tell you about India’s push to sync every system to its own time and why it matters.

Prefer listening instead? Whether you’re jogging, commuting, or just too lazy to read, tune in to listen to this story and more on Spotify or Apple podcasts.

And before we begin, if you're someone who loves to keep tabs on what's happening in the world of business and finance, then hit subscribe if you haven't already. We strip stories off the jargon and deliver crisp financial insights straight to your inbox. Just one mail every morning. Promise!

The Story

Two aliens are recording a podcast.

One laughs, “So these humans… they literally invented this invisible thing called time!” The other clacks, “Right? They chopped up a day into 24 parts, then split each into 60, then 60 again… and now they worship it with alarms, deadlines and what not!”

The laughter now turns to wheezing.

And as absurd as it sounds, they have a point. Time’s a man-made construct. The universe didn’t care about your 9-to-5, your birthday reminders or stock orders at 3:29 p.m. But once we built society on it, we needed everyone to agree. And that’s where things got messy.

We built clocks. Then atomic clocks. Then networks of clocks synced across satellites, servers, courtrooms, power grids and fighter jets. Every country made its own tweaks. The US has six time zones. Nepal decided to be 15 minutes off from India. And France, for some reason, has 12. But no matter the differences, the world runs on this invisible consensus. Miss a millisecond, and systems break.

And yet, for all our obsession with time, India’s digital systems still run, ironically, on someone else’s clock.

And that’s what the Indian government wants to fix with something called One Nation, One Time. It’s a policy that seeks to anchor all of India’s digital and legal infrastructure to a single, ultra-precise, India-controlled time standard.

The idea is simple. Replace foreign time signals and GPS with India’s own atomic clocks, delivered through our own satellite system (which is the Navigation with Indian Constellation or NavIC system), and make sure everyone, from a railway server in a small town to a satellite uplink, runs on the same nanosecond-accurate clock.

Because right now, most of our systems from phones, payment gateways to telecom networks and even stock trading platforms, rely on time signals from foreign sources like the US’ Global Positioning System (GPS) satellites or Google’s cloud servers. They’re fast, embedded into global tech stacks, and well, easy to use.

Only a few core systems like ISRO, DRDO, exchanges are directly synced to India’s own NavIC satellite system. Everyone else is essentially winging it with third-party time feeds.

And that can go horribly wrong.

Take 2016, for instance. A GPS bug introduced a 13-microsecond glitch. That’s just 0.013 seconds. But it broke parts of telecom networks, disrupted police radio in the US and threw off time-stamped data globally. High-frequency traders, who make millions off microseconds, felt it. In Europe, a timestamp issue in 2020 briefly knocked out services across TV and telecom.

So yeah, time may be invisible, but its absence isn’t.

That’s why India’s time needs to be its own.

We already have Indian Standard Time or IST. That’s Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) plus 5 hours and 30 minutes — a number chosen way back in 1906, based on a longitude near Mirzapur, Uttar Pradesh. Today, it’s maintained by the National Physical Laboratory in Delhi using atomic clocks.

These clocks don’t run on gears or pendulums, but on the tiniest vibrations inside cesium-133 atoms. They “tick” at a steady rhythm — exactly 9,192,631,770 times every second. Count those ticks, and you’ve got one perfect second. The clocks are so precise that they’d be off by just one second every 30 million years!

And with One Nation, One Time, the idea is to put that precision to use, across the country and systems, in real time.

So to make this work, the government is building a nationwide time network from scratch. It has set up five Regional Reference Standard Laboratories in Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Bhubaneswar, Faridabad and Guwahati. Each lab has super-accurate atomic clocks, all perfectly in sync. These act like local hubs, sending out India’s “true time” to nearby regions.

This time will power everything from banking and telecom to transport, energy and defence using special time-sharing systems called NTP (Network Time Protocol) and the even more precise PTP (Precision Time Protocol). The best part? These clocks will keep everything across the country accurate to within just 0.1 milliseconds.

And soon, a new law — the Legal Metrology (IST) Rules, 2025, is expected to roll out. Once it does, businesses and institutions may no longer be allowed to use foreign time sources like GPS or cloud servers. Instead, they’ll have to rely only on Indian IST for everything from timestamping electricity bills to tracking e-commerce deliveries. In fact, the government has already asked stock exchanges, SEBI and banks to discontinue use of alternative systems such as GPS.

But why is all this happening now, you ask?

Because in today’s world, time is infrastructure. Every millisecond matters when money moves digitally, data is tracked in real time or AI is making decisions on your behalf. If your systems don’t agree on time, they can’t agree on reality.

And that’s dangerous. Especially when over 4 billion users still rely on time signals from US-controlled GPS satellites. If GPS gets spoofed or jammed (as has happened in Ukraine and the Middle East) critical Indian systems like ATMs, air traffic control or even radar systems could go dark.

Countries like the US and China know this. They’ve invested billions in secure, domestic time dissemination with ground-based backups, sector-specific traceability and even quantum experiments. The EU has similar initiatives with its global navigation satellite, Galileo.

India, meanwhile, has relied on patchwork by syncing its clocks to global systems and hoping small errors won’t cause problems. And that’s the risk One Nation, One Time is trying to evade.

Because the economic costs of inaction are real too. A US report once pegged losses from poor time synchronisation at $1 billion a day (in fraud, outages and errors). India doesn’t even track that number. But UPI delays, power grid losses and telecom billing errors already hint at it.

Of course, building this backbone won’t be cheap. Setting up atomic clocks, building satellite redundancy, rolling out secure sync protocols — all of it could cost hundreds of crores. Just ask Europe. Their high-precision timekeeping initiative costs tens of millions of euros every year. And they already have a head start. India’s rollout will cost significantly more and it’s unclear if private sectors like banking or telecom will foot the bill to sync up.

Integrating it across sectors is a different challenge altogether. Because convincing thousands of institutions to upgrade, comply and stay compliant will be slow. And expensive.

And then there’s the contradiction no one’s talking about.

For years, states like Assam and Arunachal Pradesh have argued for a separate time zone. The sun rises by 4:30 a.m. in winter there and sets before 5 p.m. But schools and offices still follow Delhi’s IST schedule. In fact, studies suggest that India loses up to 2.7 billion units of electricity each year due to inefficient lighting caused by sticking to a single time zone. That’s over thousands of crores annually in wasted power.

So while One Nation, One Time might sound efficient, it’s also… paradoxical. We’re doubling down on one clock, while parts of the country argue that they need a different one altogether.

A smarter solution might’ve been using the same atomic clock grid to support dual time zones — one for the rest of India, and one for the Northeast. That way, India gets precision and practicality. And as per some calculations, $4.1 billion in human capital gains.

But for now, the plan is singular. One time, one signal, one source.

And while that raises questions — if time becomes centralised under one agency, who audits it? What’s the fallback during outages? Will it be more reliable than the current patchwork? — it also solves a bigger issue. It gives India control over its most underrated infrastructure: time.

So yeah, maybe aliens would laugh at humans for inventing time. But they’d stop chuckling if they saw a country trying to control it down to the nanosecond on its own terms.

Until next time…

Don’t forget to share this story on WhatsApp, LinkedIn and X.

Did you know? Nearly half of Indians are unaware of term insurance and its benefits.

Are you among them?

If yes, don’t wait until it’s too late.

Term insurance is one of the most affordable and smartest steps you can take for your family’s financial health. It ensures they do not face a financial burden if something happens to you.

Ditto’s IRDAI-Certified advisors can guide you to the right plan. Book a FREE 30-minute consultation and find what coverage suits your needs.

We promise: No spam, only honest advice!