Daylight saving time and its applicability in present context of Nepal

I had my first experience of daylight saving time last week in which from last Sunday of March 1 A.M. all clocks were forwarded by 1 hour as a result the time zone which I was living in became +2 GMT from +1 GMT. Just like any normal person who would hear about lots of different subjects but never bother to give any thought about it till he/she is affected by it. Now I was affected by this shift of time and wondered why would anyone do such a thing? So, I turned to my trusted source of information (Google), and tried to learn about it. Turned out the concept has been implemented in modern times to save energy. First during each of the world wars to conserve energy from normal households and use it for war efforts and most recently during 1970's Arab oil embargo, which threatened Europe and America to the brink of energy crisis. But the concept itself turned out to be pretty old. Ancient Romans and other ancient civilizations were found to do it and in more newer age Benjamin Franklin during his stay in Paris, thought that if all the peoples woke up early in summer and make use of daylight, it can reduce the use of candles and oil for lighting in evening. He didn't just talked about it, he was pretty serious about it and he even wrote and published an essay about it. Though he never lived to see his idea being implemented, but now almost 70 countries around the world change their time during summer. 

Now, that got me thinking, that these 1st world nations who now have no worries about saving energy still change their time. Most of new generation would just take the change in time as one of those things just happens without knowing the main reason for its existence or ever get annoyed by it. But we Nepalese are in the one of the worst energy crisis and we can make use of any idea that can save energy from households and channel it to our industries. Why not use this idea? Lets see how much energy we can save from actually using more of the daylight. 

I have added a couple of charts from 2011 Annual report of Nepal Electricity Authority. In which first chart states that 43% of total energy that is consumed in Nepal is consumed for household purposes. Basically this means 43% of our nations total energy is consumed for lighting, television, fridge, etc in urban areas whereas in rural areas it would almost all mean for lighting. Now, on the second picture I posted which is also taken from NEA Annual report 2011 and it gives the clear idea about in which hours of the day we are using maximum energy. On studying the curve we can see that from 6 PM in the evening to 9 PM in night is the peak hour for our energy consumption. And naturally during the summer it starts to get dark around 6 and lots of Nepali go to bed by 9-10 PM in night. 

 Any normal Nepalese firm open from 9-10 in the morning and to get to work a normal Nepali person would have to wake up around 7 AM(no disrespect to anyone who wakes up early or later than this time) in the morning and as we all know during normal summer day, sun will already be shinning by then and it will be nice and bright by then. So lets imagine we implement day light saving time by 1 hr, i.e. moving the time forward by 1 hr. So, now for summer Nepalese Standard Time becomes +6 hrs 45 Minutes to GMT. Now, offices will start at normal time that is 9 -10 AM of this new time and will finish by 5-6 PM which means a normal Nepali will reach home 1 hour early during which time it will still be bright effectively lessening the use of electricity for lighting at the start hours of our peak load duration. We might not be able to save a lot with this move, but the we are not even investing a lot to make this change. So, any savings in energy we make from this move is going to be a bonus. I know I am feeling the effects of this change of clock as I am the one who wakes up with the alarm rather than natural  body clock, but peoples get over 5,6,7 hrs of jet lag in matter of weeks. So, it wont be a great deal of problem for anyone and life will go as normal saving a bit of electricity and may be little bit reduction of loadshedding. I don't see there will be any harm done with this move except Nepalese life will begin one hour early.