I used to have a conversation with my US team exactly at 6:45 pm twice in a week but on November 7 day light saving was ended in US and my schedule of conversation shifted to 7:45 pm. It’s a mid-winter here in Nepal and it gets dark at 5:15 pm or so. And my friend, 7:45pm the conversation time feels like midnight, which raised a question “what is this day light saving” which is affecting my schedule so much.

I searched on the net and especially wiki is the best place to find information. And I got to know that it’s a wonderful concept which can really impact economy as a whole. It’s a mechanism to save the day light. It is just a concept but a wow concept. Then what happens in this wow concept that’s the prime concern. It gets like this; we have longer days in summer and shorter days in winter. In summer, Sun rises early at about 5:15 am (average) and Sun sets at about 6:45 pm (average), so to utilize the early morning natural light, in the beginning of summer at about 2 am, time is shifted to 3 am and it is done on the nations standard time, and every citizen do the same on their clock as well. So if our usual time to wakeup is at 6 am without day light time, then we wake up at 6 am but ( time shifted 1 hour fast) hence we wake up at 5 am that is one hour early. And it really don’t feel like we are waking up early because after all time is 6 am. This way we have extra one hour of evening time where we can utilize the day light. In some countries daylight saving is done on winter as well, i.e. shifting from 2 am to 1 am or 3 am to 1 am (depending on the region) because sun rises late in the winter.

This way if day light saving would also been here in Nepal, then on our 9am-6pm office, we wouldn’t have reached home in the dark. Exact timing without day light saving would be 8am-5pm but our clock would have shown 9am – 6 pm and we would have reached home in the day light. Also, one hour less electricity would have been consumed by houses and nationwide reduce in consumption would definitely impact economy as a whole. This is just one example. But there are many organizations and industries that depend highly on day light. Certainly impact would be huge. But despite changing time, in Nepal we reduce 1 hour working time i.e. 10am-4 pm instead of 5 pm. Let’s say if there are 100K government employee and even 2 months winter time (let us also say total working days = 50) then there is a total loss of 50 * 100K = 5000K hours.

100,000 (employee) * 50 (winter work days) = 5000,000 hours
5000000(hours) / 8(working hours) = 625000 working days
625000(days) / 250(avg. working days in a year) = 2500 years
And with avg. working age of a man, let’s say 30 years.
2500 years / 30 (a man’s working age) = 83 (approx) man’s life.
And my friend that’s a huge loss for a nation in a year (in just one winter).
All the data are approximate. But exact loss would be more than this.

Day light saving is a wow concept.