Refugees, inflation and power cuts: How Sri Lanka walked itself into a mess

Sri Lanka's retail inflation has already hit 17.5 per cent in February and the food inflation has risen over 25 per cent, leading to highly inflated food and cereal prices.

Sri Lanka is supposedly facing its worst economic meltdown since its independence in 1948 and things are only looking to get worse. Imagine scenes of the Sri Lankan army deployed at every petrol station to help orderly distribute fuel while men and women wait in long queues to buy petrol and kerosene. This is all thanks to a major shortage of fuel, forcing people to bear the supplementary skyrocketing prices of essentials.

This queue was longer than this, just managed to capture only this part, in Grandpass this morning. The queue is mainly for kerosene since there has been no gas in the market and sometime back, 12.5 kg was sold for Rs 5500.#SriLanka pic.twitter.com/IhMu0OWbDy

Last weekend, the price of cooking gas was raised by a major gas company by nearly 1,400 Sri Lankan rupees, with gas cylinders now costing a whopping 4,200 Sri Lankan rupees, which is around 1,200 Indian rupees. The fuel shortage has also resulted in long power cuts lasting more than six to seven hours a day.

This situation has also resulted in India facing a possible refugee crisis with people, especially from the northern part of Sri Lanka choosing to escape onto the shores of Tamil Nadu, mostly in Rameswaram. Last week, six Sri Lankans, including three children, unable to get work amid skyrocketing prices in the country, arrived in Tamil Nadu's Rameswaram on a boat. A couple with their four-month-old child and another woman with her two children reached the sand dunes near Danushkodi.

One of the two families, while speaking to the media, said they decided to leave Sri Lanka for India due to the current economic situation in their country. The rising prices of food and essentials and their inability to get any work to sustain themselves prompted them to become refugees in India for their children's survival.