Office visits slip; retail and recreation up a bit

Power generation & traffic point to limited activity than before

The recent gains in economic activity seemed to have taken a break in the latest week. Key indicators, including power generation and office visits, showed a dip after rising in previous weeks.

Office visits were more than three percentage points further away from normal, shows mobility data. Search engine Google uses anonymised location data to track visits to various categories of places. This helps analysts and policymakers assess how people are moving during the pandemic. The data is released with a lag and the latest is as of August 23. Retail and recreation visits were slightly higher than the previous week. Transit stations recorded more activity (seechart1).

Traffic congestion was lower in both Mumbai and New Delhi. Mumbai had regained 90 per cent of its traffic in the previous week, shows global location technology firm Tomtom International. This dropped to 65 per cent for the week ending August 29. New Delhi traffic, too, showed a decline to 71 per cent of normal (seechart2).

Business Standard also tracks nitrogen dioxide emissions, which come from vehicles and industrial activity. Delhi emissions were down 27 per cent for the latest week, compared to near-normalcy before. This is for the seven days ending Sunday, August 29, compared to the same period in 2019. Mumbai emissions, based on Bandra locality data, also showed a decline (see charts 3, 4).

Power consumption during the week ended August 29, meanwhile, was higher than the corresponding week in 2020 and 2019 but the rise was lower than the previous week. India generated over 4200 million units of electricity per day on average during the week ended August 29 — up 10.7 per cent during the same week in 2019 and a gain of 16 per cent over 2020 (seechart5).

The Indian Railways was a bright spot. It showed a higher year-on-year growth in goods carried compared to before (see chart 6). The quantity carried was up 21.2 per cent for the week ending August 29 against 19.6 per cent in the previous week. Freight revenue rose 28.54 per cent compared to 20.8 per cent previously.

Business Standard tracks these indicators as a means of getting a current sense of how the economy is doing. Official macroeconomic data is often released with a lag. Analysts globally have been tracking similar indicators as different countries went into lockdown to control the Covid-19 pandemic.