Time is the only inheritance that cannot be unequally divided

Tomorrow morning a billionaire in South Mumbai and a vegetable vendor in Seelampur will both receive an identical endowment: 86,400 seconds. No bank can transfer that gift, no will can bequeath it, no court can attach it for debt, no algorithm can compound it. Seneca wrote to his friend Lucilius in 49 CE that ‘it is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it’. Twenty centuries later, the observation has become the only honest measure of social justice. Material inheritance is unequally divided by birth, geography and history; time alone is handed out in equal portions, the lone egalitarian endowment in a stratified world. The deeper question for the republic is whether its institutions help every citizen spend that endowment on something more than mere survival, or whether large slabs of it are siphoned away before the citizen even notices the loss.

The first injustice in modern India is the silent levy of stolen time. The NITI Aayog Composite Water Management Index of 2019 recorded that women in rural Bundelkhand walk between two and three hours daily for drinking water — a private tax of roughly 800 hours a year, paid in lifespan. The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005 mandates wages within fifteen days; in practice, delays of weeks remain routine, and the Anjali Bhardwaj-led 2022 litigation before the Supreme Court documented cases of nine-month wage backlogs in tribal Jharkhand. Conversely, the Jan Dhan-Aadhaar-Mobile trinity compressed pension delivery from six weeks to seventy-two hours after 2014; direct benefit transfers under more than 300 central schemes now reach beneficiary accounts within hours of release. The most under-counted welfare achievement of the past decade is not money disbursed; it is hours returned. The most under-counted welfare failure is, conversely, hours stolen by inefficient process.

A second injustice is the time of others held hostage in queues we did not authorise. The National Judicial Data Grid in May 2025 records 5.16 crore cases pending across Indian courts, with average district-court pendency of 1,162 days; over 80,000 cases have been pending in the Supreme Court for more than five years. Hussainara Khatoon v State of Bihar (1979) first read speedy trial into Article 21, but the doctrine struggles against the throughput. In 2024 the Supreme Court, granting bail in repeated UAPA matters, observed that prolonged pre-trial detention violates not only liberty but the constitutional right to time itself — a year in an under-trial barrack is a year of a life, irreversible. Bilkis Bano spent fifteen years pursuing justice between 1992 and the 2008 verdict, and another fifteen years before the 2024 reversal of premature remission. Justice delayed is, quite literally, lives spent in waiting rooms; the right to time is the unstated half of every fundamental right.

Time injustice runs further still, into the intergenerational ledger. India’s general government debt, by the IMF’s 2025 Article IV estimate, sits at 81 per cent of GDP — an interest bill committed to future taxpayers who did not vote on the loan. Climate change is the most expensive theft of future time on record; Greta Thunberg’s ‘how dare you’ at the United Nations Climate Action Summit on 23 September 2019 was not theatrics, it was actuarial accusation made on behalf of an unborn electorate. The 73rd and 74th Amendments tried to push decision-making closer to the citizen’s clock by devolving power to panchayats and municipalities, and the 16th Finance Commission must now confront the question of how to make local governance temporally responsive. The Old Pension Scheme debate, revived in four states between 2022 and 2024, is a textbook case of present-tense relief paid for with an off-balance-sheet credit card future workers must service. To borrow against the unborn is the costliest of all silent loans.

Philosophically, there is an honest tension. Equal hours do not produce equal opportunity. Pierre Bourdieu showed in Distinction (1979) that a child of educated parents inherits not money but ‘cultural time’ — pre-loaded vocabulary, museum visits, weekend reading, dinner-table political argument. Statistically, life itself is unevenly portioned: the Adivasi life expectancy in Jharkhand is between four and seven years lower than the national mean, per NFHS-5 disaggregation. Bihar’s child stunting rate compresses the years available for cognitive development. Time-equality is therefore the moral starting point, not the social outcome. To stop at clock-equality is to mistake the gift for the journey it permits, and to mistake an opportunity for a guarantee.

There is a fourth dimension that deserves attention: the time spent on what Daniel Kahneman called ‘the experiencing self’ versus the ‘remembering self’. A society obsessed with metrics of remembered productivity often forgets to ask whether the experiencing time was worth living. Bhutan’s Gross National Happiness Index, formalised in 2008, includes ‘time use’ as one of nine domains; surveys ask citizens how many hours they sleep, how many they spend with family, how many they devote to community work. India’s Time Use Survey, conducted by the NSO for the first time in 2019 and again in 2024, finds women spending 19 per cent of daily hours on unpaid domestic work against men’s 2 per cent — a gendered theft of time that no income statistic captures. The Periodic Labour Force Survey has begun, since 2017, to disaggregate by gender, but the time-use lens remains under-integrated into welfare design. To measure what a society actually values, count not the rupees but the hours.

What follows is a quiet redirection of welfare. The most radical thing a state can do is return hours: same-day passport delivery (achieved), automatic pension credit (largely achieved), court-mandated trial deadlines (still aspirational), piped water (in progress under Jal Jeevan Mission), predictable electricity (uneven), gender-budgeted urban transport (under-funded). The Greek language distinguishes chronos, sequential time, from kairos, the opportune moment; a republic that mostly delivers chronos and rarely creates kairos has missed half the assignment. Rabindranath Tagore wrote that ‘the butterfly counts not months but moments, and has time enough’. A republic is judged not by the wealth it concentrates but by how much of every citizen’s clock it returns to them. Of all our common inheritances, the unredistributable one carries the heaviest claim — for time, alone, cannot be unequally divided, only unequally spent.