Rising Covid cases hit power, traffic
Effect on Mumbai’s economic activity appears more pronounced than Delhi’s
A record surge in cases of Covid-19 seems to have acted as a drag on key weekly indicators of economic activity.
Power generation growth fell to single-digit figures compared to 2019. The latest numbers show that India generated around nine per cent more electricity than it did in the year before the pandemic. Growth had been over 15 per cent in January (seechart1). The analysis looked at power generation on a seven-day rolling average basis.
All data is as of Sunday, April 11, except for mobility numbers from search engine giant Google, which is released with a lag. The latest Google numbers are as of April 7.
The mobility data shows an increase in the number of essential shopping visits. Google uses anonymised location data to keep a track of how people are moving during the pandemic, tracking visits to various kinds of places by category. The numbers are compared to the times before the pandemic. People have reportedly been stocking up on essential goods amid talks of fresh lockdowns to control case numbers that are nearing 200,000 aday( see chart 2).
Pollution data that Business Standard tracks showed a widening emissions gap for nitrogen dioxide over 2019 in Mumbai which is among the worst affected places.
Nitrogen dioxide comes from industrial activity and vehicles. Delhi, on the other hand hasn’t seen as pronounced an effect on its emissions. The gap over 2019 has actually narrowed over the previous week (seechart3,4).
This is also borne out by traffic congestion data. Mumbai’s traffic is down 65 per cent compared to 2019, according to data from global location technology firm Tomtom International. It was down 56 per cent in the previous week. New Delhi’s traffic congestion, which was down 41 per cent in the previous week, impoved and saw a 24 per cent decline for the latest week (seechart5).
Figures from the Indian Railways show the base effect of the previous lockdown. The current figures show growth of 79-95 per cent over the previous year in terms of the quantity of goods carried and the revenue earned from them (see chart6). Coal and coke as well as cement and related loads are among the key goods whose transport is showing growth compared to 2020.
Businessstandard tracks these indicators as a means of providing a current sense of how the economy is doing. Official macroeconomic data is often released with a lag. Analysts globally have been tracking similar proxies to get a sense of the situation on the ground as different countries went into lockdowns to deal with the Covid-19 pandemic.