As Sri Lanka struggles to recover from its worst economic crisis in decades, its people are leaving for better opportunities abroad. Government figures suggest some 122,000 people have left the country till May this year - the same number that left the country in all of 2021! Faced with rising prices and growing poverty, their reasons for leaving are quite evident.
I personally know a few former colleagues of mine from our Sri Lanka subsidiary who have left the country over the last year or so. Some to Australia and few to the UK. They all were having a harrowing time before they left, especially one who nearly ran out of some life-saving medication for his kid. We managed to get a few months of supply over to him from India. But that near-miss really shook him up and he left Sri Lanka as quickly as he could.
There are still some senior folks there who are in denial over the situation. Most of these have generational wealth and are largely insulated from on the ground realities that the middle and lower income people have been facing. They kept reporting back incorrect information on the situation at the peak of the crisis and kept saying that the media is over-hyping the situation, because they were concerned that we might shut down our office there (which we had no plans to and in fact we gave increased allowances to our staff to help them with the crazy inflation).
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