We will prove Prime Meridian runs through Ujjain, and change world time: New MP CM

{ MOHAN YADAV } IN MADHYA PRADESH ASSEMBLY

- Shruti Tomar

The Madhya Pradesh government will work to shift the Prime Meridian, the line of longitude that is used as the global reference for time, from Greenwich in England to Ujjain, the state's newly minted chief minister Mohan Yadav said on Thursday in the course of a speech where he railed against rampant "westernisation".

Responding to the governor's assembly in the state assembly, Yadav said his government will "prove that Ujjain is the global Prime Meridian", and stressed that he would push to "correct the time of the world".

"It was our (Ujjain's) time that was known in the world, but Paris started to set the time and later, it was adopted by the British who considered Greenwich the Prime Meridian," he said.

Yadav was referencing an ancient Hindu astronomical belief that Ujjain was once considered India's central meridian and that the city determined the country's time zones and time differences.

It is also the basis of time in the Hindu calendar. Ujjain, the belief goes, is located at the precise point of interaction with the zero meridian and the Tropic of Cancer. It is also the location of what is India's oldest observatory, built by Sawai Jai Singh II of Jaipur in the early 18th century.