According to the rules, elections must be held between four and eight weeks of closure of nominations and it is expected that the Election Commission will set the date for the last week of January.

Five other provincial council elections were put off indefinitely in August after the government pleaded its inability to provide security to candidates and voters as it would involve withdrawing troops from a military offensive in northern Sri Lanka against the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE).

As elections can be postponed only under an emergency, the government resorted to the politically messy move of extending theexisting emergency in the northeast of the country to the rest of Sri Lanka.

It provoked the UNP and other opposition parties like the Mahajana Eksath Perumena (MEP) and the Janatha Vimukthi Perumena (JVP) to move court against the postponement.

The Supreme Court then questioned the validity of a government move to introduce an amendment to the constitution, after the matter went to the court, empowering the election commissioner to postpone the elections and fix new dates.

It is now anybody's guess when the elections to the five provinces will be held.

Provinces were introduced into Sri Lanka's highly centralised system of governance through the 13th amendment to the constitution after the 1987 Indo-Lanka Accord.

The system was a means to enforce devolution of power primarily to the Tamil-dominated northeast. Its extension to the rest of the country was incidental, but beneficial.

Ironically, the northeast province has been virtually non-existent since its creation in 1988 and ruled by the centrethrough a governor, while the fruits of power-sharing are being enjoyed by politicians in the rest of the country.

Through her still deadlocked package of constitutional reforms, President Chandrika Kumaratunga hopes to replace the provincial councils with regional councils with more wide-ranging powers than in the present system.