http://go.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=scienceNews&storyID=11432552&src=rss/scienceNews
S.Lanka to turn back clocks by 30 mins in April
Mon Mar 6, 2006 05:57 AM ET
COLOMBO (Reuters) - Sri Lanka will permanently move its clocks back by
half an hour in April, a senior official said on Monday, putting the
island five and a half hours ahead of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) in line
with neighbor India.
The director of the policy research and information unit at the Sri
Lanka's president's office, Lucien Rajakarunanayake, said the decision
came after parents complained that it was still dark when children left
for school in the mornings.
"It is the President's decision," Rajakarunanayake said, adding the
change would happen on April 14, which the island's majority Sinhalese
and minority Tamils both mark as the start of a new year.
The move will reverse a 1996 decision to move the clocks forward to
reduce electricity consumption in the evenings, pleasing politically
powerful Buddhist monks and astrologers who never accepted the original
change.
Sri Lanka moved its clocks forward by an hour in May 1996 to help
reduce demand for electricity after a string of power cuts. But the
clocks were shifted back half an hour later in the year to their
current position of six hours ahead of GMT, following protests.
The government decision will also put clocks in the island in line with
Tamil Tiger rebels, de facto rulers of a seventh of Sri Lanka, who
never adopted the original time change in their territory.
