Daylight savings confusion

This was the first year that Bangladesh tried out Daylight Savings Time.  There’s a huge problem with electricity shortages here, leading to what they call “load shedding” – rolling brown-outs or black-outs, where parts of the city are left without electricity for hours a day.  In the worst parts of the year (when supply is down and demand is highest) the electricity can be out for 12 hours a day, 3 or 4 days in a row.  (Disclaimer: our house enjoys the uncommon benefit of having a large generator, so we don’t suffer from these outages in the same way the majority of the city does.)

To try to save electricity this year, the government of Bangladesh decided to implement Daylight Savings Time for the first time ever.  To say the least, this was a bit of an adjustment.  On June 19th this year, the clocks moved one hour ahead – spring ahead, right?

Well, some people moved ahead.  Many other people continued to operate on “old time”.  For a few weeks, you had to specify “new time” (DST) or “old time” (not DST) whenever you made an appointment.

Tempting though it may be to assume, those guilty of sticking to “old time” were not just people in the village who don’t keep a regular schedule.  “Old time” holdouts included businessman, people who live in Dhaka and watch the news on TV and know that things were supposed to change.  It’s just that, well, they didn’t.

Gradually everybody got on the same page, and thankfully now there is no more “old time/new time”.  But now, of course, the time has come to “fall back” to old time – except that the government didn’t pass that part of the law.  Cross that bridge when we come to it, I guess.  So now we’ve got this:

A power ministry high official said the government has decided not to revert to the old timing and instead re-arranged office and school timings.

“But there will still be some benefits after the evening. For instance, the shops will close at 8:00pm [which in GMT+6 is 7:00pm] and therefore ease pressure on demand onwards,” he said.

(Read the whole article on the time change in the Daily Star.)

What??  Could this possibly get any more confusing?  They’ve realized that they need to switch back to “old time,” because the sun keeps coming up later every day (odd), and people don’t want to go to work or school in the dark.  However, the solution is apparently NOT to switch back off of daylight savings time.  Instead of a nice, organized, national time change, the government has decided to keep the current time and will instead change the start and end times of all schools, businesses, and government offices so as to achieve the desired savings in electricity use.

Really?