Nestled in the emerald hills of Nagaland is Kohima — India’s easternmost state capital. Every summer, its residents face a peculiar problem. Kohima sees the sun rising at 4 a.m. With hours to go before India’s workday begins, Kohima waits in bed for the westward-moving sun to wake up the rest of India.

Kohima’s problem is one that is common to people in every village and city in east India. Their forced procrastination has serious consequences. With nearly four hours of daylight wasted, there are big losses to eastern India’s productivity. The country also loses a critical opportunity to tackle its worsening power crisis — especially the peak-hours power shortage that occurs early morning and late evening. The solution to both problems could lie in another re-partitioning of India — this time into two time zones.

The idea of two time zones for the country is not new. In fact, the sub-continent followed such a policy well before Independence. In 1884, at the International Meridian Conference in the US, it was agreed that India (then under British rule) would have separate time zones for its two biggest Presidencies then — Bombay and Calcutta. This was done to reduce the confusion caused by all Indian cities running to their own local time. It wasn’t until Independence that India’s two time zones were unified, while, ironically, the country itself was divided physically.