J

AKARTA: 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.