Sri Lanka Sinhala & Tamil New Year Nekath 2026 — Auspicious Times

The Sinhala & Tamil New Year — Aluth Avurudda in Sinhala, Puthandu in Tamil — is a sidereal new year marked by the sun's transit from Pisces (Meena Rashi) into Aries (Mesha Rashi). The transit is not a civil event tied to midnight; it is an astronomical one that almost always falls on 13 or 14 April. The exact minute is computed each year by the Government Astrologer using panchanga-based methods derived from the Sūrya Siddhānta tradition, and published as an official proclamation by the Department of Government Information.

This page is a data viewer, not a calculator. Sri Lankan astrology is empirical and traditional — there is no closed-form formula to derive ritual minutes from a date. Every value on this page is transcribed verbatim from the 2026proclamation. The tool's computations are limited to:

1. Reading the 8-row data table from lib/data/sri-lanka-sinhala-tamil-new-year-nekath.ts and resolving each Colombo wall-clock time to a UTC instant by appending the fixed Sri Lanka offset of +05:30. Sri Lanka does not observe daylight saving time, so the conversion is unambiguous.
2. Computing time-until each ritual against the user's device clock. The countdown updates every second; the “Now” badge appears for any ritual whose start has just passed but whose duration window has not yet closed.
3. Generating an iCalendar (RFC 5545) payload deterministically from the data table on download. Every event has a stable UID (slny-2026-<ritual>@induwara.lk), DTSTAMP, DTSTART, DTEND, SUMMARY, and DESCRIPTION fields.
4. Cross-checking the data table at render time: verifyChronology() asserts every row is strictly later than the previous, and punyaKalayaDurationMinutes() derives the Punya Kalaya duration from the two boundary entries independently of the proclamation's stated duration. A mismatch between either check and the source would surface as a visible build error rather than a silently wrong page.

The page is reviewed manually each January or February — that is when the Government Astrologer publishes the next year's nekath through the Department of Government Information. The data file carries a LAST_VERIFIED constant which is updated only after a maintainer has cross-checked every row against the latest release.

• Department of Government Information — annual Government Astrologer nekath proclamation
• Government Press Gazette — official auspicious-times notification
• University of Colombo — Sūrya Siddhānta / panchanga methodology reference material

Times on this page were transcribed from the official sources on 2026-05-16. The data file is reviewed every January and February — when the Government Astrologer publishes the following year's proclamation — and the LAST_VERIFIED constant is bumped only after a row-by-row cross-check.