Govt starts creating IST dissemination infrastructure

India's timekeeper, National Physical Laboratory, has begun the process of setting up an infrastructure to disseminate Indian Standard Time to all and sundry before the government comes up with a law to make the use of IST mandatory in India.

Since the 1950s, the Delhi-based laboratory maintains the IST using a set of very precise atomic clocks that are so accurate that they would lose or gain one second in about three lakh years.

On Wednesday, the NPL signed a memorandum of understanding with IFR Information Dissemination Services Pvt Ltd, a Kolkata-based subsidiary of the German firm EFO GmbH, to provide precise and accurate IST information on a real-time basis to users.

"We are setting up the infrastructure to spread IST to the users before the government comes up with a law to make use of IST mandatory," Dinesh K Aswal, NPL director, told DH.

Currently, it is not legally mandated to use the IST. As a result, users like telecom and internet service providers, banks, power grid, aviation, railway network and military can use time signals from open sources, most of whom are located in the USA.

With the government's emphasis on digitalisation, there is a concerted effort to spread the IST for better cyber-security as electronic transactions would be "time-stamped" with the IST.

"NPL being a CSIR research institute, it doesn't have the wherewithal for the IST dissemination. That's where the partnership with IFR will help," he said.

Almost 9 months ago, the laboratory issued an advertisement looking for a commercial partner. The IFR was one of the firms that responded and eventually got selected because of the experience that its parent company has for doing a similar task in Germany.

The company will set up two towers, one each in the north and south India. Each tower would be having a footprint over an area of 1,000 km radius. Everyone within that zone will get the IST signals if they use instruments (like clock and mobile phones) fitted with a radio chip.

The technology they would use for transmission is called Long Wave Radio technology. It's a transmitter-receiver technology in which the receiver is fitted with the radio chip.

"We will invest 20-25 million Euro (Rs 160-200 crore) to set up the infrastructure, which may take about 2 years to come up. While the time service would be provided free to the users, we will use the same infrastructure to provide other revenue earning services," said Pawan Kumar Kasera, managing director of IFR.

As a part of the same process to disseminate IST, the Union consumer affairs ministry in February approved a Rs 100 crore to plan to install atomic clocks in seven regional reference standard laboratories for accurate time-keeping and dissemination to clients. The NPL also signed an agreement with Isro for the same purpose.