Recovery tracker: Power generation and freight data show slower growth

Power generation and goods that the Indian Railways carried have dropped from higher growth numbers seen in earlier weeks.

The average amount of electricity generated in the country was lower than the previous week. Power generation is now down 15 per cent below the recent high of around 4,500 million units per day on average in the middle of August this year. Over 3,800 million units of electricity were generated per day on average during the week ending September 19. This is marginally higher than the same period in 2019, but lower than the corresponding week in 2020. At its peak, power generation was 26.3 per cent higher in August than was seen during the same period in 2019 (see chart 1).

The Indian Railways showed a slower growth in goods carried than before. The quantity of goods carried for the latest week was up 0.3 per cent compared to the same period last year. It was 5.8 per cent in the previous week. Similarly, the growth in the amount of money that the Indian Railways made from carrying goods dropped from 12 per cent to eight per cent (see chart 2).

The number of visits to bus, train, subway and other transit stations was at 99.1 per cent of what was seen before the pandemic. Visits had been trending up. They touched their high during the Ganpati festival which lasts a number of days in Maharashtra. Important festival days included Ganesh Chaturthi which was on September 10 and Anant Chaturdashi on September 19. Search engine Google uses anonymised location data to track how people are moving during the pandemic.  The data is released with a lag. The latest is as of September 14 (see chart 3).

Business Standard also tracks emissions of nitrogen dioxide. It comes from vehicles and industrial activity. Delhi emissions were 25.8 per cent below normal as seen in 2019. This was marginally better than the 26.6 per cent below 2019 figure seen in the previous week. Mumbai’s emission gap over 2019 widened to 47.7 per cent (see chart 4,5).

Traffic also showed a mixed picture. New Delhi traffic had come back to 90 per cent of normal in the latest week, shows data from global location technology firm TomTom International. It was 88 per cent in the previous week. Mumbai traffic was down amid the Ganesh festival (see chart 6). The total number of vehicles registered for the week ending Sunday, 19th September was 2,90,816. This was six per cent lower than the 3,10,723 figure seen for the same period in 2020. It is down 20 per cent from 2019's figure of 3,62,188.

Business Standard tracks these indicators on a weekly basis to get a current sense of how the economy is doing. Official macroeconomic data is often released with a lag. Analysts globally have been using similar indicators to track how economics are doing as different countries went into lockdown to control the Covid-19 pandemic. Google data is released with a lag. The latest is as of September 14. All other data is as of Sunday, September 19.