The goal was to erect the world’s tallest artificial Christmas tree, but Sri Lankan organisers now say they will be lucky to get the tree up in time for the holiday.

Hundreds of port workers and volunteers were scrambling on Tuesday to build the enormous tree on a popular beachside promenade in Colombo, Sri Lanka’s capital.

Once assembled, the steel-and-wire frame should stand 98 metres high – more than 40m taller than the current record-holder.

Organisers said they wanted the tree to help promote ethnic and religious harmony in the Buddhist-majority South Asian island nation.

“This is just to show the world that we can live as one country, one nation,” said the former cricket player Arjuna Ranatunga, now Sri Lanka’s minister of ports and shipping. Sri Lanka has “issues regarding religion, caste and race”, he said.

In recent years, Sri Lanka’s reputation as an inclusive multicultural country has suffered amid complaints by minority Christian and Muslim communities of state-sponsored discrimination.

There have also been allegations of widespread abuses against minority ethnic Tamils both during and after the country’s civil war against Tamil rebels, which ended in 2009.

Since assuming power in January 2015, President Maithripala Sirisena and his government have ushered in an era of transparency and postwar reconciliation, but have yet to make good on many of their promises, including discovering the fate of thousands of people who disappeared during the war or investigating alleged wartime abuses by the military.

“The new government has taken steps to control most of the things,” Mr Ranatunga said, describing the Christmas tree as “one small gesture that we can show the world that we can live in harmony”.

Some non-Christian residents of Colombo – where Christmas lights and Santa Claus imagery overtake shopping malls during the holiday season – were delighted by the enormity of the tree challenge.

-The Nation 
-Agencies