COLOMBO: The number of Sri Lankans seeking to obtain a passport and leave the country has doubled since last year, government data shows, as many say they want to find work abroad in the face of the worst economic turmoil in decades.
For months, Sri Lanka has lacked the foreign currency to buy all that it needs from abroad. The country of 22 million people last month defaulted on a multimillion-dollar foreign debt payment, deepening its worst crisis since it gained independence in 1948.
There have been extreme short- ages of fuel, food and lately also a lack of medicines, which has brought the health system to the verge of collapse. Inflation is now running at 40 percent.
Sri Lanka’s Immigration and Emigration Department told Arab News on Friday that while one year ago the agency’s head office would process about 2,000 applications a day, it now receives between 4,000 and 4,500.
Those who want to leave say the situation has become impossible to handle. A recent UN survey found that around two-thirds of Sri Lankan households have been forced to reduce their food intake. “Things are difficult here,” Nandawathie Arachige, a 36-year-old mother of two from Kurunegala district in the North Western Province, told Arab News.
She is going abroad to work as a housemaid or caregiver to be able to sustain her family back home.
“At least my earnings abroad can make our life easier and help us make the ends meet,” she said.
Many said they want to relocate to the Middle East, which is already a major source of remittances for the island nation, being home to about 1 million Sri Lankan nationals — 66 percent of the country’s migrant workers.
Fazly, a Sri Lankan who lives and works in Kuwait and is now processing documents to move the rest of his family to the Gulf, said he made the plans so that they could have a better life there “than the misery in Sri Lanka.”
Not everyone who migrates has committed to return.
Mohammed Mafeek, a 26-year-old from Colombo, told Arab News that he had hired an agent to help him go to Canada.
“I will never sight Sri Lanka again,” he said. “But I will send money to my family.”
