Indian govt finally kicked a nasty habit: Calendars | Economic Times

Last September the Indian government quietly made an announcement whose effects will only become apparent at the end of 2021. Starting from this year, all central government organisations, from ministries to PSUs and banks, will stop printing calendars and diaries.This might seem logical at a time when even the most basic electronic devices have some kind of time tracking built in. Calendar sales have been declining for decades – as far back as 1992 the Times of India (ToI) published a story on companies slashing budgets for calendars as part of their marketing efforts. With other forms of advertising booming, the free corporate calendar seemed rather old fashioned.And yet the government was still printing a huge amount. One report used data from the Directorate of Audio-Visual Publicity to estimate a spend of Rs8.8 crores on 1.9 million calendars and 1,20,000 diaries, as well as other booklets, pamphlets and posters. In past decades, when the numbers were even larger, and printing times slower, work on next year’s calendars would already have started around now, in March-April.In 2000 ToI, reported on the process of producing just the official state calendar of Maharashtra: the directorate-general of information and public relations would suggest a theme and once approved, teams would put together reference materials. “After it has been sifted by several secretaries, it lands up with the industry minister, which oversees the government central press.” And, the final approval, of course, had to come from the chief minister.One can only wonder how much official time went in calendar making! But the officials knew the consequences if things went wrong. In 1994, for example, the Railway Board had already printed 10 lakh calendars when prime minister Narasimha Rao, who was by then super sensitive to religious sentiments, responded to criticisms that its theme of religious shrines didn’t have notable Hindu ones. ToI reported: “those who protested against the calendar did not seem to be convinced that the inclusion of the pictures of Mount Kailash was sufficient to achieve the secular balance.” Despite being the mythical abode of Lord Shiva it could just seem like scenic beauty, and an actual temple was needed.“The calendar has long been used as a source of power,” writes Jay Griffiths in her book Pip Pip: a Sideways Look at Time. The earliest priests derived their power from tracking the movement of the seasons and fixing festivals at times like solstices. The Christian church continued this tradition through the need to fix the date of Easter. The Gregorian calendar we now follow across the world is a by-product of this.In 1928 ToI reported extensively on a bitter debate that had broken out in Maharashtra over the panchang, the calendar found in all observant Hindu homes that sets the dates of fasts and festivals, most notably for Ganesh Chaturthi. The revisionist faction, which claimed to have used modern scientific data to resolve discrepancies that had come up over time with the original calendar, explicitly aligned itself with nationalist politics by calling themselves the Tilakites, after Lokmanya Tilak, who had passed away by then, but whose son supported them.In 1946 another calendar dispute arose over the Bombay Moneylenders Bill. The version of the Hindu calendar commonly used in the city, which followed the lunar cycle, fell short of the actual year by a few days, and it was alleged that extra interest might be levied for those extra days. This was used as an argument to drop the Hindu calendar for the Gregorian one, but a reader wrote in to point out in practice the extra days were collected every three years into a 13 month, for which no extra interest was charged.Problems like this, multiplied by different community calendars across India, impelled Jawaharlal Nehru to set up a Calendar Reform Committee soon after Independence to iron out these differences with an official Indian calendar. The head of the Committee was the renowned astrophysicist Meghnad Saha, who was personally an atheist, but was willing to respect community sentiments to achieve the task. The Shaka calendar they arrived at is still used by the Government of India to cite dates along with the Gregorian dates, even if it is rarely printed.The Indian government is not alone in having its own calendar – many countries have their own, like the Islamic hijri calendar or the Chinese lunar calendar. And if there is a positive to be taken from the decline in official printed (Gregorian) calendars it is that, as has happened repeatedly in the online world, individual desires can be followed alongside mainstream ones. While our official lives may be dictated by digitised (Gregorian) calendars, there is nothing stopping us following – and even printing – the community calendars of our choice, or even entirely personal ones, set by the flowering of the trees in our gardens, the dates that matter to family members, or anything really that we like. At a time when the constant changes of Covid is making nonsense of all normal calendar dates, perhaps the time has come to embrace the calendars we create on our own.