Convert Time from one time zone to another using Java 8 Time

It seems that whatever service you found was being overhelpful in interpreting what you meant and assumed North American Easter Daylight Time (EDT) when you specified EST (Easter Standard Time). Most, not all of the places using EST as standard time are using daylight saving time and hence were on EDT or offset UTC-04:00 on the date you use, April 30, 2015.

If it makes sense in your situation you should always prefer to give time zone in the region/city format, as Asia/Kolkata and America/New_York. If you intended Eastern Time as in New York or Montréal, one may say that your “time zone” of GMT-5:00 was wrong and the cause of your unexpected result.

So your code becomes for example:

    String inputDate = "2015/04/30 13:00";
    DateTimeFormatter sourceFormatter = DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm", Locale.US);
    LocalDateTime local = LocalDateTime.parse(inputDate, sourceFormatter);
    // local : 2015-04-30T13:00
    //Combining this local date-time with a time-zone to create a ZonedDateTime. 
    ZonedDateTime zoned = local.atZone(ZoneId.of("Asia/Kolkata"));
    // zoned : 2015-04-30T13:00+05:30[Asia/Kolkata]
    ZonedDateTime zonedUS = zoned.withZoneSameInstant(ZoneId.of("America/Montreal"));
    // zonedUS : 2015-04-30T03:30-04:00[America/Montreal]

I have made one other change: When using the modern classes from java.time, there is no point in also using the outdated TimeZone class, so I have taken that out. The code is slightly simpler, and more importantly, ZoneId.of(String) includes validation of your time zone string so you will discover any spelling error in the time zone name (like when I just happened to type a ( instead of the / in Asia/Kolkata — such happens all the time).

Most of the above has already been said in comments by Jon Skeet and others. I thought it deserved to go into an answer so it’s plain to see that the question has been answered.