– Mita Mukherjee

A section of academics have opposed Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan’s recent claim regarding geographical position of Ujjain in Madhya Pradesh and his proposal to establish “Mahakal Standard Time” replacing the “Greenwich Mean Time”.

“The recent claim by Union education minister Shri Dharmendra Pradhan that Ujjain is where the Equator and Tropic of Cancer meet is fundamentally incorrect and represents a shocking disregard for basic science. Geometrically and geographically, this statement is an impossibility. The Equator (0° latitude) and the Tropic of Cancer (roughly 23.5° N latitude) are parallel east-west circles on the Earth’s sphere. Because they are parallel, they can never intersect. Furthermore, while the Tropic of Cancer does pass through central India, the Equator lies entirely south of the country. For the education minister to bypass middle-school geography in a public forum is highly concerning”, Tarun Kanti Naskar, general secretary of All India Save Education Committee, an organisation of college and university teachers, academics and scientists told EducationWorld.

While inaugurating a meet on “Mahakal: The Master of Time International Conference” in Ujjain, the Union education minister said that Ujjain is the place where the Equator and the Tropic of Cancer meet and in ancient time, calculations of world time was made on the basis of this line.

Pradhan claimed at the meet that he had asked some AI tools to crosscheck the information and the tools recognised the fact that the area around Ujjain is the original centre of worldwide time calculations.

The minister had suggested that the time has now come to set up the “Mahakal Standard Time” replacing the “Greenwich Mean Time”.

“We are well aware of the historical context that before the necessity of global standardisation, it was universally common for ancient civilisations to establish their own local prime meridians based on culturally significant cities—just as the Greeks used Alexandria, Islamic scholars used Baghdad, and the French used Paris. In this exact same logical tradition, ancient Indian texts like the “Surya Siddhanta” considered Ujjain the prime meridian of their coordinate system. However, acknowledging this rich, localised history of ancient astronomy is entirely different from justifying it today by inventing demonstrably false modern geographical claims. The fact remains that since all places of Earth with different longitudes have different times, one just has to fix a particular longitude line as the basis and measure the times of all other places with respect to that. It can be any arbitrary line and there is no special significance of this line. It is just that historically the longitude of Greenwich has been adopted internationally as that line,” Prof Soumitra Banerjee, physicist and former director of Indian Institute of Science Education and Research (IISER), Kolkata told EducationWorld.

He said in order to maintain a global longitude standard the Greenwich Meridian was globally accepted as zero degree longitude. It was necessary to consider the Greenwich Meridian as zero degree longitude to set a standard for worldwide time calculations. “The zero-point longitude is arbitrary,” he said.

“It is palpably clear that Shri Dharmendra Pradhan’s only design is to glorify Ujjain’s geographical position, without any scientific basis, for introducing ‘Mahakal Standard Time’ (MST) in place of GMT, thus making our country laughingstock before international community,” an academic said.

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