Ghati Pal to Hours and Ishtkaal: How to Calculate

A birth time written as a count of ghati and pala rather than as hours and minutes is usually an ishtakaal (also spelt ishtkaal or ishta kala). Reading one needs two things: the unit conversion, which is fixed arithmetic, and the sunrise the count started from, which changes every day and with every town. This page does both, with every figure computed from the site’s own sunrise tables.

Ghati, Pala and Vipala

The English Wikipedia article on Hindu units of time sets the small units out as a ladder of sixtieths. Sixty vipala make a pala, sixty pala make a ghati, and sixty ghati make one full day and night. The same table lists vighati and vinadi as other names for the pala, and nadi and danda as other names for the ghati. Cut 24 hours into sixtieths three times and the clock lengths follow:

So 1 vighati is equal to one pala, 24 seconds, not a sixtieth of a pala. Two shortcuts do most of the work. An hour is 2.5 ghati, so hours = ghati × 0.4. A clock-minute is 2.5 pala, and a clock-second is 2.5 vipala.

Converting Ghati-Pala to Hours, and Back

To turn ghati-pala into clock time, multiply the ghati by 24 minutes and the pala by 24 seconds, then add. 10 ghati 30 pala is 10 × 24 = 240 minutes plus 30 × 24 = 720 seconds, which is 4 h 12 min. Going the other way, turn the duration into minutes and multiply by 2.5 to get pala, then divide by 60: 3 h 17 min is 197 minutes, × 2.5 = 492.5 pala, which is 8 ghati 12 pala 30 vipala (the half pala left over is 30 vipala).

Because a vipala is 0.4 s, an odd number of clock-seconds lands on half a vipala; every other row comes out whole. The converter behind these tables was run on all 216,001 vipala of a day, from zero to a full 60 ghati, and each one comes back unchanged after a trip to the clock and back.

What Ishtakaal Counts

In the horoscope-casting convention that uses it, ishtakaal (इष्टकाल) is the time that has passed from the sunrise that opened the birth’s Hindu day to the moment of birth, written in ghati, pala and vipala. It is a duration, not a time of day. That answers the question “is ishtkaal am or pm”: it is neither, and a figure such as 39 ghati says nothing about the clock until it is added to a particular sunrise. The Hindu day runs from one sunrise to the next, as the page on the birth vaar sets out, so ishtakaal starts at zero each sunrise and climbs to about 60 ghati by the next one.

Three Worked Births at New Delhi, 2027

The births are imaginary. Sunrise is read from the site’s DE421 table for New Delhi, which drops the seconds of each sunrise, so the true sunrise can be up to a minute later than printed and each ishtakaal below can be up to 2.5 pala longer than one counted from the exact moment.

A morning birth: 08:06 on 18 April 2027.

• Sunrise to count from: 05:53 on Sunday, 18 April 2027
• Elapsed clock time: 2 h 13 min, which is 133 minutes
• Into pala: 133 × 2.5 = 332.5 pala
• Into ghati: 332.5 ÷ 60 = 5 ghati, remainder 32.5 pala
• Ishtakaal: 5 ghati 32 pala 30 vipala

An evening birth: 21:30 on 9 August 2027. Sunset that day is at 19:06, which is already 33 ghati 20 pala after sunrise, so a night birth carries a large ishtakaal without any change of method.

• Sunrise to count from: 05:46 on Monday, 9 August 2027
• Elapsed clock time: 15 h 44 min, which is 944 minutes
• Into pala: 944 × 2.5 = 2360 pala
• Into ghati: 2360 ÷ 60 = 39 ghati, remainder 20 pala
• Ishtakaal: 39 ghati 20 pala

A birth before sunrise: 03:20 on Saturday, 20 November 2027. That morning’s sunrise is not until 06:47, so the birth still belongs to the Hindu day that began with the previous morning’s sunrise. Counting from the same-morning sunrise would give minus 207 minutes, which is the sign of the mistake.

• Sunrise to count from: 06:46 on Friday, 19 November 2027, the day before the calendar date
• Elapsed clock time: 20 h 34 min, which is 1234 minutes
• Into pala: 1234 × 2.5 = 3085 pala
• Into ghati: 3085 ÷ 60 = 51 ghati, remainder 25 pala
• Ishtakaal: 51 ghati 25 pala

That figure is larger than the 26 ghati 40 pala at which the 19 November sunset fell. To recover the clock time from any ishtakaal, add it to the sunrise it was counted from: here 06:46 plus 20 h 34 min is 03:20, which has passed midnight and so carries the next calendar date.

The Same Clock Time Gives Different Ishtakaal

Take a birth at 10:00 IST. At New Delhi the year’s earliest sunrise is 05:22, held from 7 June to 15 June 2027, and the latest is 07:15, held from 8 January to 15 January. A 10:00 birth on the first run of dates has an ishtakaal of 11 ghati 35 pala; on the second it is 6 ghati 52 pala 30 vipala. The gap, 113 minutes or 4 ghati 42 pala 30 vipala, comes from the season alone.

Place matters too, because all of India keeps one clock while the Sun rises earlier in the east. The table gives sunrise from the site’s city formula on two dates inside those Delhi runs, with the ishtakaal of a 10:00 birth.

Of the 38 cities with a city panchang page, Guwahati has the largest 10:00 ishtakaal on both dates; the smallest is Jammu’s on 15 January and Kochi and Thiruvananthapuram’s on 15 June. Ahmedabad, a little west of Mumbai and well to its north, has the smaller ishtakaal of the two in January and the larger in June: the longitude gap is the same all year, while the pull of latitude reverses with the season. Over every day of 2027 and all 38 cities, sunrise runs from 04:30 at Guwahati (1 June to 18 June) to 07:33 at Jammu (3 January to 15 January). A 10:00 birth then carries anything from 6 ghati 7 pala 30 vipala to 13 ghati 45 pala, a spread of 7 ghati 37 pala 30 vipala, with the larger figure 2.2 times the smaller. An ishtakaal copied from someone else’s town or date is not a shortcut.

A Sunrise-to-Sunrise Day Is Not Exactly 24 Hours

The 60-ghati day of the unit table is a fixed 24 hours. The day that ishtakaal is counted inside runs from one sunrise to the next, and that is a little shorter or longer. To measure it, the New Delhi sunrise was found to the second with the Sun-position and horizon formulas in the site’s lagna code, and checked to land inside the whole minute the DE421 table gives on every day of 2027. The shortest sunrise-to-sunrise interval of the year, in late March, is 23 h 58 min 50 s, 70 seconds under 24 hours; the longest, in late November, is 24 h 00 min 48 s, 48 seconds over. More than half of the year’s sunrise-to-sunrise days run longer than 24 hours.

If such a day is divided into exactly 60 parts, one part comes to 23 min 59 s on the shortest and 24 min 01 s on the longest, and a pala to between 23.98 and 24.01 seconds. The arithmetic consequence is small: by the end of the day the two ways of counting are never more than 70 seconds apart, a little over one clock-minute and under 3 pala. This page does not say which division any almanac or program uses.

Dinmaan: Day Length in Ghati

Dinmaan is the length of daylight, sunrise to sunset, and it converts like any other duration. Read off the New Delhi DE421 table, the shortest daylight of 2027 is 619 minutes, 25 ghati 47 pala 30 vipala, on 6 dates between 17 December and 27 December; the longest is 838 minutes, 34 ghati 55 pala, on 9 dates between 15 June and 25 June. The dates come in a scatter rather than a single block because the table drops seconds at both ends of the day. Over the year the daylight swings by 9 ghati 7 pala 30 vipala. Those figures are for New Delhi; the panchang tool also computes New Delhi alone, so for another city take its sunrise and sunset from the city pages and convert the difference with the 2.5-pala-a-minute rule.

Where Ishtakaal Goes Next

Some special lagnas are counted directly in ghati from sunrise: the ghati lagna, which moves one sign per ghati, is worked through on the hora, ghati and bhava lagna page. The ordinary lagna does not need ishtakaal at all. The manual lagna method starts from the clock time converted to UT, so someone holding only an ishtakaal first adds it to the sunrise to get back the clock time. The dasha balance page likewise reads the Moon at the birth moment itself, so it too needs the recovered clock time.

What This Page Does Not Give

Nothing here reads a chart, a birth time or a ghati of the day as favourable or otherwise, and no ritual or course of action is attached to any of these numbers. Conversion and sunrise arithmetic can be checked to the second; whether a reading drawn from them is true is not something that arithmetic can test, so the page stops at the numbers.

In Brief

• Units: 1 ghati = 24 min, 1 pala (vighati) = 24 s, 1 vipala = 0.4 s; 3,600 vipala to a ghati
• Shortcuts: hours = ghati × 0.4; minutes × 2.5 = pala
• Ishtakaal: time from the birth day’s sunrise to the birth, a duration and never am or pm
• Before sunrise: count from the previous morning; 03:20 on 20 November 2027 at New Delhi gives 51 ghati 25 pala
• Same clock time: a 10:00 birth spans 6 ghati 7 pala 30 vipala to 13 ghati 45 pala across 38 cities in 2027
• Day length: sunrise to sunrise at New Delhi is within 70 seconds of 24 hours all year

In Hindi: घटी पल से घंटे और इष्टकाल कैसे निकालें.