Lasanda Deepthi, a 43-year-old Sri Lankan woman, plans her day around 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 waits through the night for petrol and when she does get it, it costs two-and-a-half times the amount it did eight months ago.
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.
Her monthly income of about 50,000 Sri Lankan rupees ($138) started falling from January and is now less than half of what she used to earn.
“I spend more time in line for petrol than doing anything else,” Deepthi said. “Sometimes I join a line about 3 p.m. but only get fuel about 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 is separated from her spouse and has a married 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.”
