Workplace attendance up, retail & recreation visits dip

Vehicle registrations continue into third week of decline

More people are reporting to work even as retail and recreation visits showed a decline over the previous week.

Workplace visits were 18.9 per cent higher than a baseline value calculated for early 2020 before the Covid-19 pandemic took hold. Search engine Google tracks mobility using anonymised location data. It uses this to provide information on how people are moving during the pandemic, based on visits to various categories of places. Retail and recreation spots saw fewer people than in the previous week (see chart 1).

There was also a drop in power generation. India’s power stations generated a total of 4,371 million units of electricity on a rolling seven-day basis as of the end of the latest week. This is 20.4 per cent higher than it was in the corresponding 2019 period. It is, however, 3.2 per cent lower than it was in the previous week (see chart 2).

Vehicle registrations declined for the second week in a row. Indians registered a total of 366,242 vehicles. This is 8.4 per cent lower than the corresponding period in 2019 (see chart 3). Absolute numbers were also lower than the previous two weeks.

Monday morning traffic in major cities was lower than before, showed data from global location technology firm Tomtom International. Monday 9am traffic congestion in New Delhi was 41 per cent lower than in 2019, compared to a 27 per cent decline seen in the previous week. Mumbai’s traffic was down 54 per cent compared to the previous week’s 48 per cent decline relative to 2019

(see chart 4).

There were over 2,700 domestic flights every day during the previous week. They carried an average of over 374,000 passengers. Numbers were broadly in line with the previous week (see chart 5).

The Indian Railways registered a higher quantity of goods transported than before. It was up 17.7 per cent for the latest week. The amount of money it made from carrying these goods was up nearly 23 per cent (see chart 6). Coal and coke accounted for the commodity with the highest tonnage so far this year.

Business Standard tracks these indicators to get a weekly picture of how the economy is doing. Official macroeconomic data is often released with a lag. Analysts globally have been tracking similar indicators to get a sense of how the economy is reacting to the pandemic. The traffic data is as of Monday, May 30. Google data is released with a lag. The latest is as of May 25. All other data is as of Sunday, May 29.