Time for change when Sri Lanka turns back the clocks

Colombo: For Buddhist monks and astrologers, when Sri Lanka permanently puts its clocks back thirty minutes at midnight tomorrow, the island is putting itself back in sync with the stars and planets.

For those of a more technocratic bent including the island's most famous foreign resident, science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke shifting the country's clocks for the third time in a decade in unnecessary and harmful to its image.

And for those who regularly travel between government and rebel Tamil Tiger held areas, putting the two on the same time-zone for the first time in a decade will end a sometimes irritating and confusing difference. The Tigers, de facto rulers of a seventh of Sri Lanka since a 2002 truce halted two decades of civil war, never accepted the original 1996 time change and simply kept their clocks set five and a half hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), in line with neighbour India.

Sri Lanka's decade long flirtation with setting time six hours ahead of GMT began when President Chandrika Kumaratunga put the clocks forward by an hour with the aim of giving an extra hour of light in the evenings and reducing electricity demand.

But the dark mornings produced by setting clocks at GMT plus six and a half hours provoked an outcry, and the same year the clocks were pushed back again, where they have remained ever since except in Buddhist temples, astrologers' offices and, of course, in rebel territory.

"When the clock is reset on April 14 we will be with nature again," said television astrologer and teacher Piyasena Ratuwitana, who like the monks believes the old time is inviolate.