Lasanda Deepthi, a 43-year-old Sri Lankan woman, plans her day with fuel queues.
Key points:
- Auto rickshaw driver Lasanda Deepthi says she is struggling to make a living from the financial crisis
- It is the worst economic crisis in Sri Lanka since independence in 1948
- Reforms are coming thanks to the appointment of a new prime minister, but Ms Deepthi, like millions of others, remains disappointed.
Driving a car-rickshaw on the outskirts of the commercial capital Colombo, she watches the fuel gauge of her sky-blue three-wheeled vehicle closely before accepting a job to make sure she has enough fuel.
When the needle is almost empty, it joins the line outside a gas station. Sometimes he waits all night for gas, and when he gets it, it costs two and a half times more than eight months ago.
Ms Deepthi is one of Sri Lanka’s millions of people struggling with rampant inflation, falling incomes and a shortage of everything from fuel to medicines, as the country suffers its worst economic crisis since independence in 1948.
A woman driving a rickshaw is a rare spectacle on the island of 22 million people on the south coast of India.
Lasanda Deepthi says she spends more time in the queue for gasoline than anything else. (Reuters: Adnan Abidi)
But it’s a job Ms. Deepthi has done for seven years to support her family of five, using the local PickMe transport app.
“Sometimes I only get fuel about 12 hours later”
Since the financial crisis hit, it has been struggling to find the right fuel and earn enough as travel has slowed and inflation has risen beyond 30% year-on-year.
His monthly income of about 50,000 Sri Lankan rupees ($ 190) started to fall from January and is now less than half of what he earned before.
“I spend more time queuing for gasoline than doing anything else,” Ms Deepthi said. “Sometimes I get on a line around 3pm, but I only get fuel about 12 hours later.
“A couple of times I got to the front of the queue just to run out of fuel,” he added as he made tea at his small two-bedroom rental house in Gonapola, a small village on the outskirts of Colombo. where he lives with his mother and three younger brothers.
She is separated from her spouse and has a married daughter.
In mid-May, Ms Deepthi said she spent two-and-a-half days in line to buy petrol, assisted by one of her brothers.
“I have no words to describe how terrible it is,” he said, “I don’t feel safe sometimes at night, but there’s nothing else to do.”
The fault of COVID and populist tax cuts
In a well-known routine one recent morning, he changed his clothes, filled a bottle of water, cleaned his auto-rickshaw, and lit an incense stick to seek divine blessings before boarding the vehicle.
Its mission, like most days, is to find gasoline, whose prices have skyrocketed 259 percent since October 2021, as the government cut subsidies to try to stabilize a shaky economy. .
The roots of Sri Lanka’s current crisis lie in the COVID-19 pandemic, which devastated the lucrative tourism industry and undermined remittances from foreign workers, and populist tax cuts enacted by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s administration .
Angered by widespread scarcity and accusing the powerful Rajapaksa family of mismanaging the economy, thousands of protesters took to the streets of Sri Lanka in recent months to stage mostly peaceful demonstrations.
New Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was also named the country’s finance minister last week, plans to present a six-week budget that will cut spending “to the bone” and lead it to a program. two-year welfare.
Its policies are also expected to boost negotiations with the International Monetary Fund for a much-needed loan package.
“I don’t know what our future will be like”
But Mrs. Deepthi is disappointed.
The car he bought with his savings had to be sold last year after he fell short in rent payments.
A second automatic rickshaw, usually driven by one of his siblings, needs repairs, which the family can barely afford. He has more than 100,000 rupees in arrears on loan payments for land he bought before the pandemic.
Mrs Deepthi also wants to visit her three-month-old granddaughter, but she doesn’t know how she can travel 170km to the coastal town of Matara, where her daughter, a nurse, lives.
“I can barely afford enough rice and vegetables for my family,” he said. “I can’t find the medicine my mother needs. How will we live next month? I don’t know what our future will be like.”
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AP