Cast your mind back to mid-2022. The country had roughly no dollars, which meant roughly no fuel, which meant queues that could be seen from space. People slept in their cars for days. A whole informal economy of queue-standing emerged. It was, by any measure, a national nightmare.
And then, in the middle of the chaos, something genuinely unusual happened: a government IT project worked.
The pass that saved the queue
The National Fuel Pass, thrown together in a matter of weeks by the Ministry of Power and Energy with volunteer help from the local tech community, gave every vehicle a weekly fuel quota tied to a QR code. Scan at the shed, pump your allocation, go home to your bed instead of your back seat.
It wasn’t glamorous. It was a webpage and a QR code. But it took the single most combustible social situation in the country, literal fights at fuel sheds, and replaced it with something resembling order. Within weeks, the days-long queues shrank to something merely annoying.
Why it actually mattered
Rationing by queue is the cruellest system ever devised: it taxes people in time, the one thing everyone has equal amounts of and nobody can spare. The QR system rationed by rule instead. Same scarce fuel, radically less suffering. Economists write papers about this sort of thing; we lived it between breakfast and lunch.
It also quietly proved a point the local tech industry had been shouting for years: Sri Lanka has the engineering talent to build national digital infrastructure overnight when the bureaucracy gets out of the way. The Fuel Pass team did with volunteers and urgency what big-budget projects had failed to do with years and committees.
The legacy
The crisis passed, the queues faded, and the Fuel Pass retired like an athlete who peaked at exactly the right moment. But it left behind a template: digital rationing, national QR systems, and the radical idea that a citizen’s time is worth protecting.
Every country gets a crisis. Not every country gets a QR code good enough to make the crisis briefly manageable. Pour one out (carefully, fuel prices being what they are) for the humble National Fuel Pass: proof that even in our darkest queue, somebody was shipping code.