Several surveys carried out during the past 15 years have reported a high incidence of patients (30 to 75%) complaining of moderate to severe pain after surgery. During recent years, there has been a tremendous increase in our understanding of acute pain physiology and the importance of pain relief which has led to the development of new analgesic drugs and techniques to combat postoperative pain. There are several strategies for postoperative pain relief. Intravenous opioids are commonly used in surgical patients. They can lead to respiratory depression, nausea, vomiting, and tolerance. Also, they need to be used cautiously in patients having hepatic and renal disease. Parenteral NSAIDs provide inadequate pain relief for major surgery; they also produce adverse effects on the gastrointestinal system, renal system, and coagulation. In addition, NSAIDs can cause urticaria and bronchoconstriction. There is a growing conviction that multi-modal perioperative analgesia has advantages over the use of a single modality. A combination of local anesthetics and opioids given by intrathecal/extradural route has been advocated. There are very few studies that analyses the effects of the addition of clonidine to alkalinized 0.2% ropivacaine. Therefore, these drugs have been used in the present study to determine the time of onset and duration of analgesia after a single shot epidural dose of the drug, to observe the Ramsay sedation scoring for any sedative effects of the drug, and to determine the visual analog scale scoring for pain as expressed by the patients.