Recovery tracker: More people travelling by air, workplace visits up 9.7%

Indian Railways registers higher growth in quantity of goods carried

Select high frequency indicators of economic activity showed signs of improvement in the latest week.

There were 374,000 passengers on average travelling by air daily during the latest week. This is 9,000 more tickets sold than the 365,000 figure the previous week. The number of flights has remained broadly the same at 2,700 compared to 2,707 previously.

Mumbai traffic congestion inched closer to 2019 levels, showed data from global location technology firm TomTom International. Monday morning 9 a.m. traffic congestion was within 29 percentage points of 2019 levels, compared with 39 percentage points previously. New Delhi traffic congestion was 34 percentage points below 2019 levels-worse than the previous week.

Indian Railways exhibited higher growth in the quantity of goods carried. It was up 5.9 per cent compared to 3.3 per cent previously. Freight revenue, the money it made from carrying these goods, grew 12.4 per cent compared to the previous week’s 13.4 per cent.

Essential shopping took a backseat in the latest mobility data from search engine Google. It uses anonymised location data to track how people are moving during the pandemic. Grocery and pharmacy visits are down 7.3 percentage points. Retail and recreation visits are down 7.9 percentage points. Workplace visits are up 9.7 percentage points.

People registered fewer vehicles in the latest week than the corresponding period in 2019. The numbers show a 2.5 per cent decline. The previous week had seen 5.2 per cent higher registrations than the corresponding period in 2019. There were 457,000 vehicles registered in the latest week.

Power generation was lower than in the previous week. Power plants generated an average of 3,887 million units of electricity generated daily on a seven-day moving average basis as of Sunday based on reporting day data. This was 5.4 per cent lower than the previous week’s number of 4,108 million units. The numbers are still higher than was the case in 2019, though the gap has narrowed from 24 per cent to 12 per cent.

Business Standard tracks these indicators as a way of keeping track of how the economy is doing. Analysts globally have been relying on similar indicators as official macroeconomic data is often released with a lag. The data points here provide a weekly picture of economic conditions.

Google data is released with a lag. The latest is as of October 12. The traffic data is as of Monday morning, October 17. All other data is as of the week ending Sunday, October 16.