Recovery tracker: Slower growth in rail freight, power generation

Some indicators are lower than their peak in August

Many weekly economic indicators stayed off their recent peaks after a surge earlier in August.

The number of people making retail and recreation visits was lower, showed anonymised mobility data from search engine giant Google. Shopping for essentials, too, showed a dip. Google tracks people’s visits to various categories of places. The exercise is carried out across the world. It helps provide a picture of how people are moving during the Covid-19 pandemic. Workplace visits were 14.1 per cent below pre-Covid levels for the period under consideration. These were 14.4 per cent below normal in the previous week (see chart 1).

Google’s mobility data comes with a delay and the latest is as of August 28. All other data is as of Sunday, September 5.

The amount of electricity generated in the country was growing at a double-digit pace earlier in August. This has now fallen to single-digit levels. Over 4,000 million units of electricity was generated per day on average during the week ending September 5. This is lower than the previous week. The gains in power demand over 2020 and 2019 were also lower than that seen in the month of August. Power demand last week was around five per cent higher than the corresponding week in 2019 (see chart 2).

Business Standard also tracks emissions of nitrogen dioxide, which comes from industrial activity and vehicles. Emis­sions had inched higher than even pre-Covid levels earlier in August. These were down 29 per cent in Delhi for the latest week. Mumbai emissions, based on Bandra locality data, were down 18 per cent (see charts 3, 4).

The Indian Railways had shown significant growth in the amount of goods it carried in recent times. The year-on-year growth in the quantity of goods carried fell from 21.2 per cent in the previous week to 11.3 per cent. The growth in revenue from carrying these goods fell from 28.5 per cent to 15.4 per cent (see chart 5).

The amount of traffic on major city roads, however, saw a rise, shows data from global location technology firm TomTom International. It rose to 77 per cent of normal levels in Mumbai (65 per cent last week). And it was 83 per cent of normal in New Delhi compared to 71 per cent the previous week (see chart 6).

Business Stan­dard monitors these indica­t­ors as a way of keeping a week­ly track of how the economy is doing during the pandemic. Official macro­economic data is often rele­ased with a lag. Analysts globally have been tracking similar indicators as different countries went into lockdown to control the Covid-19 pandemic.