Mumbai residents heed warning to stay home

Streets in Mumbai, India’s financial capital, were relatively empty while trading volumes in stock and bond markets dropped as residents stayed home following the worst downpour in 12 years.

The city’s Santacruz weather centre recorded 33.1 centimetres of rain in 24 hours that ended at 8:30 a.m. on Wednesday, the most since 94.4 cm of precipitation recorded 12 years ago. 

Authorities asked residents to stay at home after the weather office predicted “heavy to very heavy” rainfall in parts of the city. Still, suburban train services, which carry eight million passengers daily, resumed services and the city’s bus network added more vehicles. Jet Airways cancelled at least 12 flights from Mumbai citing weather conditions, while the Mumbai airport said it was was functioning normally.

“Trading is expected to remain thin today due to rain-related disruptions,” said Anoop Verma, vice-president for treasury at DCB Bank, adding that the treasury team only had 30 percent of its employees at work. “Many of our people didn’t go home last night and some left for home this morning.”

Trading volumes on the National Stock Exchange’s NSE 50 Nifty Index were 19 percent below the 30-day average as of 1:30 pm. Residents, home to the nation’s central bank, stock exchanges and the Indian headquarters of Novartis AG and Citigroup Inc, walked home, hitched rides on trucks or spent the night in their offices as the deluge evoked memories of the flooding in 2005 caused by a cloudburst that dumped three feet of rain on a single day, killing 570 people, grounding flights and cutting off rail and road links. 

Five people were killed, while Mumbai’s famous delivery men, known as dabbawalas, who pick up home-cooked lunch boxes from about 130,000 households, and deliver these to the respective office workers, weren’t operating, NDTV website reported. 

Trading volumes on the central bank’s trading platform were at 192.6 billion rupees as of 1:35 p.m. in Mumbai. Turnover was 364.1 billion rupees for all of Tuesday compared with the one-year average of about 498 billion rupees. 

“Activity in the bond market is low, there are few quotes, fewer deals in corporate bonds,” said Sandeep Bagla, associate director at Trust Capital Services Pvt. in Mumbai. “Few dealers are on desk, with the intention of deploying overnight cash as banking has been kept open.”

The Nifty Index rose 1 percent, while the rupee advanced 0.2 percent.

“In the wake of warnings issued by #IMD people in Mumbai and areas around #Mumbai are advised to stay back home unless there is an emergency,” office of Devendra Fadnavis, chief minister of Maharashtra, of which Mumbai is the capital, wrote in a Twitter post on Tuesday.

The rain was 4 percent below normal across the country since June 1, according to the India Meteorological Department. About 83 percent of the country received normal to excess showers during the period while rest got deficient rain, it said.

Bloomberg