JAKARTA: Chairman of the Indonesian Red Cross (PMI) Jusuf Kalla said that a single time zone for the entire country would cause severe disruptions to the lives of ordinary Indonesians.
“A single time zone means that we would have to change our habits. Why
do millions of Indonesians have to adjust their lives to the stock
market, which is 70 percent dominated by foreign investors?” Kalla said
in an interview, adding that other countries had several time zones and
remained productive.
“The United States has a total of nine time zones but it still has the biggest stock market in the world,” he said.
Indonesia is currently divided into three time zones.
Sumatra, Java, including the capital city of Jakarta, and the western part of Kalimantan are on Greenwich Mean Time (GMT)+7.
Meanwhile,
Bali and Sulawesi islands, as well as West and East Nusa Tenggara, are
on GMT+8, with the easternmost part of the country, which includes the
provinces of Maluku, North Maluku, West Papua and Papua, on GMT+9.
The
single time zone would be pegged at GMT+8, which is the time zone used
by Brunei Darussalam, China, Malaysia, Mongolia, the Philippines,
Singapore, Taiwan and Western Australia.
A government committee
is proposing that Indonesia adopt a single time zone for the entire
nation — from Sabang to Merauke — on Sunday, Oct. 28.
One reason
behind the single time zone idea is that the country could start
stock-market trading simultaneously with those of neighboring countries.
Edib
Muslim, chairman of the Government Committee for the Expansion and
Acceleration of Indonesian Economic Growth (KP3EI), which proposed the
idea, said that the single time zone plan would not cause many problems.