Gonapola, Sri Lanka: Lasanda Deepti, a 43-year-old Sri Lankan woman, is planning her day around the fuel queues.
The driver of an auto-rickshaw on the outskirts of the commercial capital Colombo keeps a close eye on the petrol gauge of her sky-high tricycle before accepting the job to make sure she has enough fuel.
When the needle is close to empty, it joins the line outside the gas station. Sometimes, she waits overnight for petrol and when she gets it, it costs two and a half times more than it was eight months ago.
Deepti is one of millions of Sri Lankans who are grappling with galloping inflation, falling incomes and a lack of everything from fuel to medicine as the country grapples with its worst economic crisis since independence in 1948.
A female auto-rickshaw driver is a rare sight on an island of 22 million people off India’s southern coast.
But it is a task that Deepti has done for seven years to support her family of five using local ride-hailing app Pikmi.
Ever since the financial crisis struck, she has been scrambling to find enough petrol and earn enough as rides have shrunk and inflation soared 30 percent year-on-year.
Her monthly income of around 50,000 Sri Lankan rupees ($138) started declining from January and is now less than half of what she earned.
“I spend more time waiting in line for petrol than anything else,” said Deepti. “Sometimes I join a line around 3 am, but only after about 12 hours get fuel.
“A couple of times I made it stand in line only to run out of fuel,” she said while making tea at her tiny 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 is separated from her husband and has a married daughter.
In mid-May, Deepti 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 awful it is,” she said, “I don’t feel safe sometimes at night but there’s nothing else to do.”
In a familiar routine on a recent morning, he changed his clothes, filled a bottle of water, wiped down his auto-rickshaw and lit an incense stick to seek divine blessings before boarding the vehicle.
Its mission, like most days, is to find petrol, whose prices have risen 259 percent since October 2021, as the government slashed subsidies to try to stabilize a weakening economy.
Sri Lanka’s current crisis has its roots in the COVID-19 pandemic, which devastated the lucrative tourism industry and remittances of foreign workers, and the populist tax cuts enacted by President Gotabaya Rajapaksa’s administration.
Angered by widespread shortages and accusing the powerful Rajapaksa family of sabotaging the economy, thousands of protesters have taken to the streets across Sri Lanka in recent months to hold mostly peaceful demonstrations.
New Prime Minister Ranil Wickremesinghe, who was also appointed as the country’s finance minister last week, plans to present a budget in six weeks that will cut spending “to the bone” and replace it with a two-year welfare programme. will take in
His policies are also expected to advance talks with the International Monetary Fund for a badly needed loan package.
But Deepti was disillusioned.
The car he had bought from his savings last year had to be sold due to shortfall in lease payments.
A second auto-rickshaw, usually driven by one of his brothers, needed repairs, which the family could hardly afford. He is more than Rs 100,000 behind on loan payments for land he bought before the pandemic.
Deepti also wants to visit her three-month-old granddaughter, but is not sure how to travel 170 km (105 mi) to the seaside town of Matara, where her daughter, a nurse, lives.
“I can barely buy enough rice and vegetables for my family,” she said. “I am not getting the medicines my mother needs. How will we be next month? I don’t know what our future will be like.”