 "Traffic, vehicles")
Key weekly economic indicators are below their highs from earlier in the year amid a surge in Covid-19 cases.
Traffic congestion in Mumbai and New Delhi had reached around 80-90 per cent normalcy in the earlier part of 2021. Delhi traffic is now 22 per cent below normal shows data from global location technology firm TomTom International. Mumbai traffic is down 46 per cent (see chart 1).
Emissions in Mumbai and Delhi remain below 2019 levels. Business Standard tracks levels of nitrogen dioxide in the air. It comes from industrial activity and vehicles. Emissions for both cities have come off their earlier highs in 2021 (see chart 2,3).
People are spending more time at home than they were in pre-Covid times. Search engine Google tracks location data to understand how people are moving during the pandemic. Data as of March 23 shows a nine per cent increase in the amount of time spent at residential locations. Workplace visits are down 15 per cent (see chart 4).
Power generation has held steady. The growth for the latest week over 2019 is over ten per cent. This is similar to levels seen in the previous week. This week also marks the beginning of the lockdowns in 2020 which had started towards the end of March. Power generation had seen a significant decline during the period as offices and factories shut down (see chart 5).
The base effect of the previous year shows up in the railways’ yearly growth figures for the latest week. The drop in railway traffic last year has meant a year-on-year growth of over 70 per cent when one looks at the quantity of goods travelling by train compared to 2020. Earnings from the goods carried also show a similar surge (see chart 6).
Business Standard tracks these weekly indicators as a means of getting a current sense of how the economy is doing. Analysts globally have been tracking similar indicators to get a sense of the situation on the ground as different countries went into lockdown to control the Covid-19 pandemic. Governments often release official macroeconomic data monthly or quarterly. There is also a lag in their availability. High frequency indicators help to understand where the economy is headed ahead of the release of the official numbers. The current trend may point to a dip in activity as the total number of cases touched their highest in months and governments began to reintroduce restrictions on movement. All data except Google (which is released with a lag) is as of Sunday March 28th.
