Date and time notation in India

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ISO 8601 has been adopted as BIS IS 7900:2001 (Data elements and interchange formats – Information interchange – Representation of dates and times - first revision).^[1]

Date[edit]

In India, the DD-MM-YYYY and DD/MM/YYYY are the two predominant short form representations of the date in the Gregorian calendar. The hyphen (-) and oblique (/) are both used as separator between the date fields. Almost all government documents need to be filled up in the DD-MM-YYYY or DD/MM/YYYY format. An example of DD-MM-YYYY usage is the passport application form,^[2] while the passport itself contains the date in DD/MM/YYYY format,^[3] as does the PAN card (used for taxation purposes).

But two expanded forms are used in India. The DD MMMM YYYY usage (e.g. 21 October 2022) is more prevalent over the MMMM DD, YYYY (e.g. October 21, 2022) usage except the latter is more used by media publications, such as the print version of the Times of India^[4] and The Hindu.^[5] Many government websites, including Prime Minister's official website, retain the historical format used by Britain (MMMM DD, YYYY) during the colonial era until sometime in the 20th century.

In India, dates in astrology or religious purposes are written in a year-month-day format.^{[citation needed]} This order is also found while reading dates in South Indian languages. (For example, 15 August 1947 would be read in Tamil as 1947 ஆம் ஆண்டு ஆகஸ்ட் 15 ஆம் நாள்.) Whereas, north Indian languages, notably Hindi and Bengali, follow a "day month year" format for reading the dates (15 August 1947 will be read as 15 अगस्त सन 1947 in Hindi and ১৫ অগস্ট ১৯৪৭ সাল in Bengali).^{[citation needed]} However, in written form, it is traditionally in "day month year" order, using a stroke or hyphen as the separator. This order is used in both the traditional all-numeric date (e.g., "31/12/99" or "31-12-99") as well as in the expanded form (e.g., "31 December 1999"). Sometimes, the ordinal number for the day before the month is written down (e.g., "31st December 1999"). When saying the date, it is usually pronounced by the ordinal number of the day first then the word "of" then the month (e.g. "thirty-first of December 1999"). The use of its big-endian date notation is not very prevalent.^{[citation needed]}

The month-day-year (12/31/1999) in short format, is never used in India except regionally in Bodo.^{[citation needed]}

Mondays are the start of the week as per ISO 8601. Traditionally, Sunday (Ravivara) is considered as the first day of the week in India and the official calendar reckoned by the Government Of India has Sunday to Saturday as the week.^[6] In Indian Railway time tables day 1 is Monday and day 7 is Sunday, e.g. train 12345 runs on days 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, in other words Monday through Friday.

Time[edit]

The 12-hour notation is widely used in daily life, written communication, and is used in spoken language. The 24-hour notation is used in rare situations where there would be widespread ambiguity. Examples include railway timetables, plane departure and landing timings. A colon is used to separate hours, minutes and seconds (for example 10:00:15).

See also[edit]

• Time in India
• Hindu units of time
• History of measurement systems in India
• Daylight saving time
• Daylight saving time by country

References[edit]