Recovery tracker: Retail and recreation visits at record high as cases drop

Improvement in traffic, power generation and other indicators; daily Covid-19 case load below 25,000

Weekly indicators of economic activity moved higher in the latest week even as daily Covid-19 cases fell below 25,000.

Retail and recreation visits were at their highest level since search engine Google made available records at the beginning of the pandemic. They are now 5.1 per cent higher than a comparative baseline value from the early part of 2020. Google gathers statistics on visits to various categories of places based on anonymised location data. Workplace visits also rose.

The rise in people stepping out for retail and recreation visits comes as the seven-day moving average for daily Covid-19 cases came in at 24,713; according to tracker Our World in Data.

There was an increase in traffic congestion. The drop in Monday morning 9am traffic congestion was recorded at 36 per cent for New Delhi. It was down 38 per cent in the previous week. Mumbai traffic is 49 per cent below 2019 levels, compared to last week’s 52 per cent drop.

The number of vehicles registered across the country was 13.9 per cent below 2019 levels for the same week. It was down 15.1 per cent in the previous week. The latest week saw 349,447 registrations compared to 335,363 in the previous week.

The Indian Railways recorded a higher growth in the quantity of goods it carried. Growth came in at 8.6 per cent for the latest week compared to 6.9 per cent in the previous week. The money it made from carrying these goods also grew at a faster rate of 13.3 per cent compared to 8.9 per cent in the previous week.

The number of air passengers continued to grow. The week ending Sunday had nearly 2.1 million domestic passengers take to the sky. It was 1.8 million in the previous week.

Electricity generation grew further last week and weekly numbers reached a six-month high last week. Power utilities across the country generated 4029 million units of electricity on average per day during the week ended February 20, 2022 (based on reporting day data) up 6.5 per cent from 3781 MUs during the corresponding week in FY21. The generation was up 7.1 per cent over the corresponding week in FY20. The power generation last week was up 0.9 per cent on a week-on-week basis.

Business Standard tracks these indicators as a way of getting a current picture of how the economy is doing. Analysts globally have been tracking similar indicators since official macroeconomic data is often released with a lag. Countries across the world have been imposing restrictions to control the Covid-19 pandemic. Such high frequency indicators give a sense of the economic effect of such steps. Google releases its data with a lag. The latest is as of February 17. The traffic data is for Monday morning, 21st February. All other data is as of Sunday, February 20, 2021.