The Azerbaijani Cabinet of Ministers has cancelled switching to daylight saving time.
The Azerbaijan National Academy of Sciences (ANAS) has proposed eliminating daylight saving time, explaining that it creates a number of psychological, social and moral issues, as well as complicates synchronization of the international time schedule.
The clocks will be set 4 hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT+4) for the whole year.
Recall, according to the decision of the Cabinet on the application of summer time on March 17, 1997, each year on the last Sunday of March the country switches to summer time by putting the clocks forward one hour.
The political scientist Rovshan Ibragimov said in an interview with a correspondent of Vestnik Kavkaza that Azerbaijan has returned to astronomical time, which is typical for its latitude in other countries. "All these years Azerbaijan has lagged by one hour from terrestrial time, if the normal time for the republic was GMT+4, after switching to daylight saving time, it was GMT+5. This had a negative effect on the biological clock of the population, its activity, causing sleep deprivation and other adverse conditions, even the number of accidents has been increasing in the country. Gradually, many countries came to the conclusion that the energy savings are not as significant as the harm to human health, so this innovation was abolished in Georgia and then in Russia. Sooner or later Azerbaijan would still have to cancel daylight saving time," he stressed.
"Now people will get enough sleep and do good work. And they also don't need to get used to the new environment twice a year. The human body is very sensitive to the need to adapt to new conditions all the time," Rovshan Ibrahimov concluded.
