Recovery tracker: Spike in mobility, traffic pointers as people go out more

Other weekly economic indicators also show signs of gains

People are leaving their houses more frequently amid a fall in reported cases.

Mobility and traffic indicators have been showing signs of revival. The number of Covid-19 cases reported daily has come down to about 100,000. It had exceeded 400,000 in the beginning of May.

Residential time spent has come down, even as workplace visits moved higher according to mobility data that search engine Google collects. The company looks at the places where people are going during the pandemic by category, based on anonymised location data.  It is released with a slight lag. The latest is as of June 2 (see chart 1).

Traffic in major metro cities is up. Both Mumbai and New Delhi have seen an upward trend in traffic congestion, according to data from global location technology firm TomTom International (see chart 2).

There has been a rise in emissions as well. Business Standard tracks nitrogen dioxide levels in key cities. It comes from vehicles and industrial activity. Delhi emissions, while lower than 2019, is better than the previous week. Mumbai emissions are also up (see chart 3,4).

The rise in activity is also seen in increased demand for electricity. Power generation is higher than it has been previously as major states started opening up various economic activities in a phased manner. The power demand was around 12 per cent higher for the latest week over the same period in 2020. And compared to 2019- a normal year- the power demand in the first week of June 2021 was down by around 9.5 per cent, an improvement from around 15 per cent demand gap two weeks ago (see chart 5).

The Indian Railways also carried more goods than in the first week of June 2020. The double-digit growth has been seen for some time now because of the lockdown in 2020. The lack of activity then provided a favourable base for this year’s numbers. Both the quantity of goods carried and earnings from them have risen (see chart 6).

 

Except for Google, all the data is as of Sunday June 6.

These weekly indicators give a sense of the situation on the ground ahead of the release of official macroeconomic data. The government often releases the data with a lag. Analysts globally have been tracking similar indicators to get a sense of the economy as different countries went into lockdowns to control the Covid-19 pandemic.