Clock ticks away for remnants of Nehruvian era

If the Apple Watch is the face of the future, the news that the public sector HMT Watches may be winding down very soon was perfectly timed: the day after the former’s launch. As the Apple product amply demonstrates, watches will no longer be merely about telling time. Unfortunately, HMT has been in a time warp of sorts, belonging as it does to an era that could not have foreseen that watches would have to offer other things too. It did come out with a Braille model and joined the quartz automatic and digital revolutions, but given the way the watch market has accelerated since then, however, it is not surprising that time may soon be running out for the ‘timekeeper to the nation’.

As long as the Indian economy was closed, things went like clockwork for HMT, tasked with producing cheap watches. Like the Ambassador cars and Bajaj scooters, aspiring consumers had to wait for certain HMT timepieces, keeping track meanwhile via sundials perhaps. The countdown to this imminent closure began when private sector players finally came in and wound up offering (comparatively) racier products, creating new titans in the horological industry. As this year has also seen the Ambassador finally retire and the Planning Commission decommissioned, the clock is obviously ticking away for remnants of the Nehruvian era.