Recovery tracker: Work attendance at record high as offices open full-swing

Electricity generation rises, more passengers on flights

Offices appear to have opened in full swing even as cases of Covid-19 continued their sharp decline.

Workplace visits are now 11.14 per cent higher than it was before the pandemic took hold, shows mobility data from search engine Google. It tracks people’s movements using anonymised location data. This is compared to a baseline value calculated on a 5-week period of January 3 to February 6, 2020. The latest numbers are the highest since Google began providing mobility data. Parks and transit stations are other categories of places which saw a record number.

India had fewer than 10,000 cases (8,013) in the past 24 hours, according to government data released on Monday.

Monday morning 9am traffic congestion continued to inch higher in some places, suggested data from global location technology firm TomTom International. New Delhi traffic is now 34 per cent from normal levels compared to 36 per cent in the previous week. Mumbai traffic is down 50 per cent.

More people took flights. The number of air passengers in the latest week was 2.2 million compared to 2.1 million in the previous week. There were around 699 additional flights which operated during the week, taking the total number of domestic flights to 15,847.

Power generation grew further last week to reach the highest level since the first week of September 2021. Power utilities across the country generated 4,090 million units of electricity on average per day during the week ended February 27 (based on reporting day data), up 6.5 per cent from 3,842 MUs during the corresponding week in the financial year ending 2021 (FY21). The generation was up 11.4 per cent over the corresponding week in FY20. The power generation was up 1.5 per cent week on week basis.

There were 24.6 per cent fewer vehicles registered across the country in the latest week compared to the same period in 2019. The gap was narrower (13.9 per cent) in the previous week. A total of 327,251 registrations took place, according to government data.

The Indian Railways saw slower growth in the quantity of goods it carried. Quantity growth for the latest week was 6.9 per cent compared to 8.6 per cent in the previous week. The money that the Indian Railways made from carrying the goods also grew at a slower pace. It was 10.3 per cent in the latest week compared to 13.3 per cent previously.

Business Standard tracks these weekly economic indicators as a way of getting a current picture of how the economy is doing. Analysts globally have been tracking similar indicators as official numbers are often released with a lag. Google numbers are as of February 24. The traffic data is for Monday morning, February 28. All other data is as of Sunday, February 27.