By Uditha Jayasinghe

GONAPOLA (Sri Lanka) – Lasanda Deepthi is a Sri Lankan woman aged 43 who plans to spend her days in fuel queues.

    The driver of an auto-rickshaw on the outskirts of the commercial capital Colombo, she keeps a close eye on the petrol gauge of her sky-blue three-wheeler before accepting a job to make sure she has enough fuel.

    When the needle is close to empty, she joins the line outside a gas station. Sometimes she has to wait all night until she can get petrol. When she finally does, the price is two-and-a half times what it was eight months earlier.

    Deepthi is one of millions of people in Sri Lanka battling galloping inflation, falling incomes and shortages of everything from fuel to medicine as the country reels under its worst economic crisis since independence in 1948.

    A woman auto-rickshaw driver is a rare sight on the island of 22 million people off the southern coast of India.

    But it’s a job Deepthi has done for seven years to support her family of five, by using local ride-hailing app PickMe.

    Since the financial crisis hit, she has been scrambling to find adequate petrol and earn enough as rides dwindled and inflation surged past 30% year-on-year.

Since January, her monthly income of approximately 50,000 Sri Lankan Rupees ($138), has been falling. It is less than half what it was.

    “I spend more time in line for petrol than doing anything else,” Deepthi said. Deepthi said, “I sometimes join a queue at 3:00 p.m. and only receive fuel 12 hours later.”

    “A couple of times I made it to the front of the queue only to have the fuel run out,” she added as she made tea in her small, two-bedroom rented house in Gonapola, a small town on the outskirts of Colombo, where she lives with her mother and three younger brothers.

She has a son and a daughter.

    In mid-May, Deepthi said she spent two-and-a-half days in a queue for petrol, assisted by one of her brothers.

    “I don’t have words to describe how terrible it is,” she said, “I don’t feel safe sometimes in the night but there is nothing else to do.”

    In a now familiar routine on one recent morning, she changed her clothes, filled a bottle of water, wiped down her auto-rickshaw and lit an incense stick to seek divine blessings before getting into the vehicle.

    Her mission, like most days, is to find petrol, prices of which have soared 259% since October 2021, as the government slashed subsidies to try and stabilise a teetering economy.

    The roots of Sri Lanka’s current crisis lie in the COVID-19 pandemic, which devastated the lucrative tourism industry and sapped foreign workers’ remittances, and populist tax cuts enacted by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s administration.

    Angry at the widespread shortages and accusing the powerful Rajapaksa family of mishandling the economy, thousands of protesters have taken to the streets across Sri Lanka in recent months to stage mostly peaceful demonstrations.

    New Prime Minister Ranil Wickrememsinghe, who was also appointed as the country’s finance minister last week, plans to introduce a budget in six weeks that will cut expenditure “to the bone” and route it to a two-year welfare programme.

    His policies are also expected to push forward negotiations with the International Monetary Fund for a badly-needed loan package.

    But Deepthi is disillusioned.

    The car she bought with her savings had to be sold last year after she fell short on lease payments.

    A second auto-rickshaw, usually driven by one of her brothers, needs repairs, which the family can barely afford. Her loan payment for the land that she purchased before the pandemic left her more than 100,000 Rupees in arrears.

    Deepthi also wants to visit her three-month-old grand-daughter but is not sure how she can travel 170 km (105 miles) to the seaside town of Matara where her daughter, a nurse, lives.

    “I can barely afford enough rice and vegetables for my family,” she said. I can’t get the medicines that my mother requires. What will our lives look like next month? “I don’t know where our future is going to take us.”