Indian National Calendar: Today's Saka Date and Months

In India’s national calendar, Thursday 29 October 2026 is Kartika 7, 1948: the 7th day of the month Kartika in the year 1948 of the Saka era. This is the calendar printed beside the Gregorian date on the Gazette of India and used by All India Radio and in government communications, according to the Wikipedia article on the Indian national calendar. It is a solar calendar with fixed months, so every Saka date falls on the same Gregorian date year after year, apart from a one-day shift for the days from Phalguna 10 to the end of Chaitra around each Gregorian leap day.

It is a different thing from the Saka year in a panchang. Both count from the same era, but the panchang’s year is lunisolar and turns at Chaitra Shukla Pratipada, while the national calendar turns on 22 March. Its months borrow the panchang’s names, Chaitra to Phalguna, without following the Moon, so the civil Kartika and the lunar Kartika are usually not the same stretch of days. This page gives the rules as the committee that drew up the calendar set them down, a hand method for converting any date, and every month from 1948 to 1950 Saka set against the Sun and the Moon.

The Twelve Months and Where Each Begins

The rules are in the Report of the Calendar Reform Committee, published in 1955 by the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research in New Delhi. Its recommendations for the civil calendar are that the Saka era be used; that the year start on the day after the vernal equinox day; that Chaitra have 30 days, or 31 in a leap year; that the next five months, Vaisakha to Bhadra, have 31 days each; and that the last six, Asvina to Phalguna, have 30. The report then prints the “permanent correspondence” with the Gregorian calendar that follows from those lengths:

Only Chaitra’s first day moves. In a leap year it begins a day early, on 21 March, and runs to 31 days, so that Vaisakha still opens on 21 April. Every later month has the same first day in every year. The Gregorian leap day, 29 February, falls inside Phalguna, the last month of the Saka year before the leap one; in 2028 it is Phalguna 10, 1949. According to Wikipedia, the calendar came into use on 1 Chaitra 1879, which was 22 March 1957.

Converting a Date by Hand

Two steps give the Saka date for any Gregorian one.

• The year: from 22 March (21 March in a leap year) to 31 December, subtract 78 from the Gregorian year. From 1 January to the day before Chaitra 1, subtract 79.
• The month and day: find the month whose first day is on or before the date in the table above, and count. The date’s day number is one more than the days elapsed since that first day.

So 26 January 2027 is in the month that opened on 21 January, five days earlier, which makes it Magha 6; it is before Chaitra 1, so the year is 2027 − 79 = 1948. Going the other way, Saka to Gregorian, add the day number less one to the month’s first day and add 78, or 79 from Pausha 11 to the end of Phalguna, the days that fall in the next Gregorian year. Each row below was converted by the same rule.

Leap Years

The report’s leap rule is the Gregorian one moved by the era: add 78 to the Saka year, and if the sum is a Gregorian leap year (divisible by 4, and a century year only when divisible by 400), the Saka year has 366 days. Its own examples are 1878, 1882 and 1922 Saka as leap years, the last because 2000 was one, and 2022 Saka as a common year because 2100 is not. Of the three years tabled on this page, only 1950 is a leap year: it opens on 21 March 2028, and its Chaitra has 31 days.

Every Month, 1948 to 1950 Saka

The third column is the date on which the Sun entered the matching tropical sign, Aries for Chaitra through Pisces for Phalguna, in Indian time, from the site’s DE421 decan table, which runs to the end of 2028. The last column is the lunar month running on the civil month’s first day, amanta (new moon to new moon), with the purnimanta name where it differs; a first day that carries a new or full moon is marked as such rather than given a month. The civil names are spelled as the committee’s report spells them, the lunar ones as the site’s panchang does.

Does Chaitra 1 Fall on the Equinox?

Not on it: the committee put the new year on the day after the vernal equinox day, and the fixed 22 March (21 March in a leap year) only approximates that rule. In the site’s table the Sun crossed the equinox on 20 March 2026, 21 March 2027 and 20 March 2028 in Indian time, and Chaitra 1 followed two days, one day and one day later. The months that follow track the Sun’s tropical signs in the same loose way. Of the 34 civil months from Chaitra 1948 to Pausha 1950 that the decan table covers, 14 begin on the same date as the Sun’s entry, 17 a day after it and 3 two days after; none begins before it, and none more than two days after.

The months cannot track the Sun exactly because their first days are fixed while the Sun’s entries are not: the Gregorian leap cycle moves each entry about six hours later each year and back by most of a day after each leap day, and the Sun covers a sign faster in the northern winter than in the summer. The report’s month lengths follow that unevenness in whole days. The months of 31 days are the ones from Vaisakha to Bhadra, which span the middle of the year, when the Earth is farthest from the Sun and the Sun moves most slowly along the zodiac; the five of them, with Chaitra, make up the longer half of the year. The site’s perihelion and aphelion page gives the dates of the nearest and farthest points.

Same Names as the Panchang, Different Months

Of the 30 civil months in the table whose first day carries neither a new nor a full moon, only seven begin inside the amanta lunar month of the same name, and 20 inside the purnimanta month of that name. Kartika shows the pattern. On 23 October 2026, the first day of civil Kartika 1948, the panchang was in amanta Ashwina, bright half, by either reckoning a month behind. On 23 October 2027 it was in the dark half of Ashwina, which a purnimanta panchang already calls Kartika. On 23 October 2028 the lunar Kartika itself was running.

The reason is the length of the lunar year. Twelve lunar months fall about eleven days short of a solar year, so the lunar months start earlier against the fixed civil dates each year, until an adhika month pushes them back. The table shows one such reset: civil Jyaishtha 1948 opened during the Adhika Jyeshtha of 2026, and from the next civil month the lunar names run one month behind. By 2028 the drift has brought them level again (Sravana, Bhadra, Asvina, Kartika, Agrahayana 1950 all open inside their own lunar month), and the next adhika month, Adhika Chaitra from 15 March 2029 on the adhik maas page, starts the cycle again. How long each lunar month runs is on the lunar month length page. The lunar festivals follow the tithis of the lunar months, not the civil month, so none of them keeps a fixed Saka date.

Two Shaka New Years

The panchang’s Shaka year turns at Chaitra Shukla Pratipada, the day kept as Gudi Padwa and Ugadi, and the site’s Vikram Samvat page dates that turn from the computed festival tables. The national calendar turns on 22 March, or 21 March in a leap year. The two are rarely the same day:

In 2026 the panchang’s year 1948 began three days before the civil one. In 2027 the order reverses and the gap is the widest of the three: from 22 March to 6 April 2027 the national calendar reads 1949 while the panchang is still in 1948. The civil new year that spring falls on Holi, 22 March 2027, the morning after Holika Dahan. The report observes that the Chaitradi lunar year begins anywhere from 15 March to 13 April, and all three years here fall inside that range.

The Six Seasons Fixed to Civil Months

The same report fixes the six ritus to pairs of civil months, so in this calendar each season has fixed Gregorian dates:

• Grishma (summer): Vaisakha and Jyaishtha, 21 April to 21 June
• Varsha (rains): Ashadha and Sravana, 22 June to 22 August
• Sharad (autumn): Bhadra and Asvina, 23 August to 22 October
• Hemant (late autumn): Kartika and Agrahayana, 23 October to 21 December
• Shishir (winter): Pausha and Magha, 22 December to 19 February
• Vasant (spring): Phalguna and Chaitra, 20 February to 20 April

This is not the pairing most people learn, in which Vasant is the lunar Chaitra and Vaishakha. It sits close to the tropical count instead, where Shishir begins at the December solstice; the six ritus page sets the lunar, sidereal and tropical counts side by side.

Who Drew It Up

The committee worked under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research with the astrophysicist Meghnad Saha as chairman; Wikipedia lists the other members as A. C. Banerjee, K. L. Daftari, J. S. Karandikar, Gorakh Prasad, R. V. Vaidya and N. C. Lahiri. Wikipedia’s account is that the committee studied some thirty calendars then in use in different parts of the country, and the report’s final recommendation was that the unified national calendar be used in all states for civil purposes. The report also proposed rules for a reformed religious calendar; according to Wikipedia this part was not accepted, and despite the government’s official Rashtriya Panchangs the civil calendar found little use outside government offices.

The name “Rashtriya Panchang” can mean two things in a search: the national calendar itself, and the annual almanac of that name, which Wikipedia lists among the publications of the Positional Astronomy Centre of the India Meteorological Department.

For the tithi and nakshatra of a single day, the daily panchang prints them at New Delhi’s sunrise, and the names and order of the sixty-year cycle that some regions use instead of a number are on the samvatsara page. In Hindi: भारत का राष्ट्रीय पंचांग: आज की शक तारीख और महीने.

In Brief

• What it is: India’s civil calendar, solar, with fixed months, counted in the Saka era
• In use since: 1 Chaitra 1879, 22 March 1957
• First and last months: Chaitra and Phalguna; the fifth is Sravana
• Year number: Gregorian year minus 78 from Chaitra 1, minus 79 before it; 29 October 2026 is Kartika 7, 1948
• Leap year: when Saka + 78 is a Gregorian leap year; Chaitra then starts on 21 March and has 31 days
• Not the panchang: the lunisolar Shaka year turns at Chaitra Shukla Pratipada, 7 April 2027 against the civil 22 March 2027