A senior State Duma deputy is asking Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev to turn back the country's clocks by one hour, arguing that the current time regime leads to more medical emergencies and even traffic accidents.
Sergei Kalashnikov, chairman of the Duma's Health Committee, said in a letter that numerous citizens were complaining about stress, health problems and economic burdens due to the lack of daylight-saving time.
"We keep getting citizens' complaints … about negative effects of living not under the real astronomic time," said the the letter, published in on Saturday.
During his four-year term as president, which ended this year, Medvedev introduced a reform that abolished daylight-saving time. But instead of keeping winter time by not setting clocks forward in spring, the country's nine time zones migrated to eternal summer time by not setting them backward in fall 2011.
Kalashnikov, a member of the nationalist Liberal Democrat Party, has been waging a campaign against the reform and introduced a bill this summer, which received initial backing from both Putin and United Russia, the governing party headed by Medvedev.
However, in October, United Russia changed tack, saying the reform could only be abolished by a state decree. Kalashnikov subsequently withdrew the draft.
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