Essay · Section B11 October 2026

Time is the one wealth a clock cannot create.

This week two teams of physicists announced the first working nuclear clocks. They may one day surpass the best atomic clocks, one of which misses a single second in 23 billion years. In the same week a newspaper reminded us that women in India aged 15 to 59 spend about 305 minutes a day on unpaid work at home. In Telangana, girls are still married off at 14 or 15 and leave school to cook and care. Put the three stories side by side and a plain truth appears. Human beings have become astonishingly good at measuring time, and remain completely unable to make any more of it. Every person, rich or poor, gets the same twenty-four hours. This essay argues that because time cannot be created, the real moral question is who takes whose time. A good society cannot add an hour to anyone’s day, but it can stop wasting other people’s hours and give them back.

The Stoic philosopher Seneca saw this two thousand years ago. “Nothing, Lucilius, is ours, except time,” he wrote to a friend. Nature had made us owners of this single thing, “so fleeting and slippery that anyone who will can oust us from possession.” Physics adds a twist: in 2010 American scientists found that a clock raised just 33 centimetres runs slightly faster, as Einstein predicted. But the inequalities of time that matter to a citizen are made not by gravity but by families, markets and governments, which decide whose hours are spent so that others may be saved.

Begin with the home. Five hours a day of cooking, cleaning, fetching and caring add up to more than seventy days a year, and almost none of it is counted in GDP. The demand to recognise this labour is older than many think. In 1939 the All India Women’s Conference equated a homemaker’s work with a factory wage, and Renuka Ray, a member of the Constituent Assembly, called a housewife as much a working woman. In the 1970s the campaigner Silvia Federici put it bluntly: “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work.” Hans Rosling told a gentler story in a 2010 talk. The day his family’s first washing machine arrived, his mother said: “We have loaded the laundry. The machine will make the work. And now we can go to the library.” The machine did not create time. It returned time to a woman, who used it to read to her son and to learn English herself. A tap in the courtyard, a gas cylinder in the kitchen and a crèche near the field do the same for millions of Indian women today.

Childhood is the most precious time of all, because it can never be bought back. A girl married at fifteen loses the years in which a person learns who she might become. India has fought for those years with a series of laws. Rukhmabai, married at eleven, refused in the 1880s to go and live with her husband, and fought the case in court rather than give in. The debate around her case helped bring the Age of Consent Act of 1891, and she went on to qualify as a doctor in London in 1894. The Child Marriage Restraint Act of 1929 set the minimum age for girls at 14; it was raised to 18 in 1978. Each law bought girls a few more years. Telangana’s figure for women aged 20–24 married before 18 has fallen from 23.5% to 17.9%, faster than the national fall, yet 20.1% of young Indian women were still married as children. Among the children identified in such cases in Telangana since 2025–26, 777 had already left school. A year in school is wealth that no later scheme can repay.

The State, too, spends citizens’ time, mostly through delay. In Hussainara Khatoon in 1979, the Supreme Court found men and women held for three to ten years without their trial even beginning, for offences that would rarely have earned more than a year or two, and held that a speedy trial is “an integral and essential part” of the right to life and liberty under Article 21. In 2020 it told Speakers that three months is the “outer limit” for deciding a defection petition, “absent exceptional circumstances”. This week twenty MPs facing such a petition received a third extension. Time can also be stolen through haste. Two women in Assam were removed to Bangladesh while their remanded cases were still being re-heard. The Gauhati High Court now asks when the tribunal’s opinion was actually ready: liberty may turn on a timestamp. Delay and haste are both decisions about someone else’s time.

There is a serious counter-argument. Surely humanity does create time. Life expectancy has risen across the world, and every machine from the tractor to the computer lets us do more in an hour. Some delay is also a virtue, not a theft. A Speaker must hear both sides; justice in a hurry can be its own injustice. The physicists behind the thorium clock spent years on a nucleus that seemed impossible to tame, and one of their first experiments found no trace of the dark matter it was looking for. And the working day itself was changed by struggle: the International Labour Organisation’s first convention, in 1919, limited industrial work to eight hours a day and forty-eight a week, while allowing British India sixty a week.

Yet each of these examples confirms the argument rather than defeating it. Longer lives and faster machines do not create time; they free it, and the freed time goes to whoever has the power to claim it. The washing machine gave Rosling’s mother her afternoons; in many homes a convenience only adds chores for the same woman. The ILO convention did not lengthen the day; it decided who owned its hours, and the double standard for British India showed how unequally that ownership was shared. Patient deliberation is valuable when the person waiting is the one who benefits. When the delay benefits the powerful and the waiting falls on the weak, it is not patience but the transfer of a cost. A simple test separates the two: whose time is being spent, and for whose gain?

From this test follows a programme. First, count time: the Time Use Survey shows what GDP hides, and policy should be judged by whether women’s unpaid hours fall. Second, return time: water, cooking gas, electricity, crèches and nearby schools are time-saving infrastructure that gives hours cash alone cannot. Third, protect childhood: keep girls in school and prosecute the adults who arrange child marriages, since a stopped wedding saves a day but schooling saves the years. Fourth, put a price on official delay: fixed timelines, recorded timestamps and consequences for those who sit on files that hold someone’s liberty or livelihood.

The thorium clock will one day measure a second more finely than any instrument in history, a real triumph of the human mind. But the measure of a society is different. It is how many hours it gives back to a girl in Vikarabad, to a woman at the end of a long day of unpaid work, and to a citizen waiting for a decision she cannot hurry. No one can create time; that is why wasting another person’s time is a quiet kind of theft, and returning it is among the highest forms of public service.