Sri Lankan woman rickshaw driver has to queue 12 hours, or more, for fuel

Lasanda Deepthi, 43, an auto-rickshaw driver for local ride hailing app PickMe, sits inside her auto-rickshaw as she waits in a queue to buy petrol during the early hours of the morning at a fuel station in Gonapola town, on the outskirts of Colombo, Sri Lanka, on May 26, 2022.GONAPOLA, Sri Lanka - Lasanda Deepthi, a 43-year-old Sri Lankan woman, plans her day around fuel queues.

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

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

Her mission, like most days, is to find petrol, prices of which have soared 259 per cent 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.

His policies are also expected to push forward negotiations with the International Monetary Fund for a badly-needed loan package.The car she bought with her savings had to be sold last year after she fell short on lease payments.

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