In India, the DD-MM-YY is the predominant short form of the numeric date usage. Almost all government documents need to be filled up in the DD-MM-YYYY format. An example of DD-MM-YYYY usage is the passport application on. But two expanded forms are used in India. The DD MMMM YYYY usage is more prevalent over the MMMM DD, YYYY usage except the latter is more used by media publications, such as the print version of the Times of India and The Hindu. Many government websites, including Prime Minister's official website, retain the historical format use by Britain during the colonial era until sometimes 20th century. In India, dates in astrology or religious purposes are written in a year-month-day format. This order is also found while reading dates in South Indian languages. Whereas, north Indian languages, notably Hindi and Bengali, follow a "day month year" format for reading the dates. However, in written form, it is traditionally in "day month year" order, using a stroke or hyphen as the separator. This order is used in both the traditional all-numeric date as well as in the expanded form. Sometimes, the ordinal number for the day before the month is written down. When saying the date, it is usually pronounced by the ordinal number of the day first then the word "of" then the month. The use of its big-endian date notation is not very prevalent. The month-day-year in short format, is never used in India, but regionally used in Bodo. Considerable confusion is created, when the date format is set to American by default in some software applications. This format is often used on Indian websites of American companies. Little care is taken by many software developers to ensure that the date format is set to Indian when their software is meant to be used in India. Mondays are the start of the week.
Time
The 12-hour notation is widely used in daily life, written communication, and is used in spoken language. The 24-hour notation is used in rare situations where there would be widespread ambiguity. Examples include railway timetables, plane departure and landing timings. A colon is used to separate hours, minutes and seconds. However, full stop is almost exclusively used instead of colons in Bengali.
