Recovery tracker: More Indians Stepping out, vehicle registrations go up

Outdoor activities have increased further with the fear of Covid-19 infections receding — even though the number of infections has gone up. According to a government bulletin on Monday, 2,541 Covid-19 cases were reported over the last 24 hours.

More Indians, however, stepped out for retail and recreational activities in the latest week than they did in pre-pandemic days. Similarly, the use of public transport also increased, though there was a decline in office visits on week-on-week basis.

Retail and recreation visits were 12.9 per cent higher than before the pandemic took hold. Visits to transit stations, too, were 27.4 per cent higher, shows mobility data from search engine Google, which tracks peoples’ movements using anonymised location data. This helps understand mobility trends across countries during the pandemic (see chart 1).

With more people venturing out, traffic congestion increased in major cities in the country last week, shows data from global location technology firm TomTom International. It was 21 per cent below the 2019 level in New Delhi; and 24 per cent below pre-pandemic level in Mumbai. The gap for New Delhi had decreased over the previous week (see chart 2).

Vehicle registrations increased and were up 9.1 per cent over the same week in 2019, compared to an average gap of 9.2 per cent during the week ending April 17, 2022. In all, 410,445 vehicles were registered across the country during the week ending Sunday, April 24 — up from 326,230 vehicles in the previous week, shows government data (see chart 3).

The number of airline passengers, however, declined week-on-week from the post-pandemic high of April 17. Airlines carried aro¬u¬nd 360,000 travellers per day on average during the week ending April 24 — down 2 per cent from 367,000 in the previous week. The number of flights were, however, up 1 per cent week-on-week to 2,791 per day on average (see chart 4).

The Indian Railways registered higher growth in the quantity of goods carried during the week (7.44 per cent). In the previous week, it was up 6.46 per cent year-on-year. The amount of revenue the Railways made from carrying these goods, called freight revenue, grew at 17.18 per cent over the same week last year, better than 15.92 per cent Y-o-Y grow¬th in the previous week (see chart 5).

Power generation also rose last week amid rising temperatures. Power utilities generated 4,534 million units of electricity on average per day during the week ending April 24. This is 23 per cent higher than the 3,685 million units generated per day during the corresponding week in 2019. Power generation was marginally up, 0.5 per cent, compared to the previous week (see chart 6).

Business Standard tracks these indicators to get a weekly picture of how the economy is doing since official macroeconomic data is often released with a lag. These give a sense of what is happening on the ground amid government curbs to control the pandemic. The traffic data is as of Monday (April 25) 9am, while Google data is as of April 20. All other data is as of April 24.