Recovery tracker: Retail and recreation visits go up, shows data

Fewer passengers on flights, vehicle registrations lag 2019 by a wider margin than before

More people stepped out for retail and recreation visits even as the number of daily Covid-19 cases slipped below the three-figure mark.
 
Retail and recreation visits were 8.9 per cent higher than before the pandemic took hold, shows mobility data from search engine Google. It tracks peoples’ movements using anonymised location data. This helps understand mobility trends across countries during the pandemic. Workplace visits also moved higher (see chart 1).
 
The number of Covid-19 cases over the last 24 hours was 913, according to a government bulletin on Monday.
 
Traffic congestion in major cities moved closerto normalcy, shows data from global location technology firm TomTom International. It was 32 per cent below 2019 levels in New Delhi. The Mumbai number showed a 41 per cent gap over 2019. The gap for both narrowed over the previous week (see chart 2).
 
The gap on vehicle registrations over 2019 was wider in the latest week. It was 24.7 per cent lower than for the same week in 2019, compared to an average 15.6 per cent gap over the previous four weeks. There were 437,976 vehicles registered across the country during the week ending Sunday, shows government data (see chart 3).
 
The number of airline passengers also showed a decline. It fell 11.1 per cent to 2.2 million passengers for the latest week (see chart 4).
 
The Indian Railways registered higher growth in the quantity of goods it carried during the week (11.18 per cent). It was 6.43 per cent in the previous week. The amount of money it made from carrying these goods, called freight revenue, grew at 16.2 per cent over the same week last year. It was up 11.48 per cent in the previous week (see chart 5).
 
Power generation grew further last week as temperatures continue to rise. Utilities across the country generated 4495 million units of electricity on average per day as of Saturday April 2, 2022, up 18 per cent year-on-year from 3810 MUs generated during the corresponding week in CY19. The generation was up 2.3 per cent higher on a week-on-week basis (see chart 6).
 
Analysts globally have been tracking similar indicators. They give a sense of what is happening on the ground amid government restrictions to control different waves of the Covid pandemic. The traffic data is as of Monday morning 9am, power generation numbers were available as of Saturday 2nd April and Google data is as of 30 March. All other data is as of Sunday, 3 April.