Recovery tracker: Power generation, consumption lower than before

Decline also seen in vehicle registrations, railway freight growth

High-frequency indicators of economic activity slowed in the latest week.

Electricity consumption in the country dipped, showed the latest week’s data, but the gap over 2019 levels increased as the decline was even bigger in the corresponding week in 2019. The power producers generated 4,302 million units (MUs) of electricity per day on average in the latest week. It was 4,310 MUs per day in the previous week. In comparison, power generation was 3,641 MUs per day during the corresponding week in 2019 (see chart 4).

Vehicle registrations declined to below 300,000 for the latest week. There were 296,000 vehicle registrations. This was 22.7 per cent lower than the 383,000 registrations seen in the same period in 2019. The gap has widened over the previous week (see chart 2).

The Indian Railways recorded lower growth in the quantity of goods carried. It was up 7.2 per cent year-on-year compared to 14.1 per cent recorded in the previous week. The money it made from carrying these goods, called freight revenue, was up 12.3 per cent compared to 19.2 per cent growth in the previous week (see chart 5).

There has also been a decline in mobility, showed numbers from search engine Google’s anonymised location data. Retail and recreation spots, grocery and pharmacy shops, transit stations and parks all saw a decline in the number of visitors. Workplace visits increased by 3.1 percentage points (see chart 1).

Traffic congestion was lower than before in major metros, showed data from global location technology firm TomTom International. There was a 34 percentage point gap compared to 2019 in the Monday morning (9 am) traffic in both Mumbai and New Delhi. The gap was smaller for both cities in the previous week (see chart 6).

The number of air passengers for the seven-days ending Sunday broadly held steady compared to the previous week. There were over 350,000 average passengers travelling every day on over 2,600 flights (see chart 3).

Business Standard tracks these indicators as a way of getting a weekly picture of the economy. Analysts globally have been using similar indicators as official macroeconomic data is often released with a lag. The weekly indicators help understand the economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic amid lockdowns and other steps that different governments globally have used to control its spread.

The Google data is released with a lag. The latest is as of September 21. The traffic data is as of Monday, 9 am. All other data is as of Sunday, September 25.