THE practice of daylight saving, to begin from April 15, seems to be a practical joke on our people. If anything, it shows that the bureaucracy will be the only beneficiary. It will give them relief of nearly two hours every day from work.
It is obvious that a very convincing proposal has been prepared by some efficient officials of the ministry of power, highlighting the positives that time change will bring about in order to ease a deteriorating power situation and that it will also end up saving some 250MW per day, as reported in the press. This is, however, sheer nonsense and a typical figure-fudging exercise.
The usual work timings for government and semi-government organisations begin from 8am to 4pm.
However, it is common knowledge that nearly 25 to 30 per cent of the staff turns up at their offices 9am/9.30pm, and not before that.
In the evening, they leave almost half and hour to 45 minutes before the usual closing time which is 4pm as almost 50 per cent of them pack up.
Against such a state of affairs, if clocks are set ahead, making office timings from 7am to 3pm according to old time, nearly 50 per cent of the staff and officers will probably not be in office at the start of the day, and neither at the end of the day.
Imagine a net loss of millions of man-hours this would prove to be every day. This would mean a drastic reduction in the work output which, I am sure, has not been highlighted in the proposal for time change.
So the time change, as long as it lasts, will be party time for our bureaucracy and government and semi-government employees, while the nation will continue to suffer additional scheduled and unscheduled loadsheddings and breakdowns.
Further, major countries in the region like India, China and Japan do not apply time change. India tried approximately 15 or 20 years earlier and abandoned the time change within three weeks as impractical, unworkable and economically unfeasible.
In Pakistan, time change was tried in 2002 but was not applied the following years because as the then information minister, Sheikh Rashid, said that the time change caused an increase in the consumption of energy instead of saving it. Europe is a major business partner of Pakistan for imports and exports. At present the time difference between Europe and Pakistan is three hours.
If the offices open in Europe at 9 o'clock it will be 12 o'clock in the afternoon in Pakistan and keeping in view the present closing time we get a clear five hours to deal with Europe. In case we resort to the time change, the time difference will increase to ¾ hours and we will lose a precious one extra hour in case of Europe, thereby affecting seriously our import and export trade.
The time change does not help Pakistan or the people of Pakistan. It must be reverted forthwith. The president is requested to act promptly.
IFTIKHAR AHMED
Karachi