Recovery tracker: Decline in railway freight numbers, air traffic

Vehicle registrations and power generation is higher than before

Select weekly indicators of economic activity drifted lower towards the end of October.

The Indian Railways carried a lower quantity of goods for the latest week than in the corresponding period last year. There was a 2.68 per cent year-on-year decline in freight quantity compared with a 1.96 growth seen the previous week. The amount of money it made from carrying these goods, called freight revenue, grew at 2.32 per cent in the latest week compared to 10.54 per cent previously.

The number of air passengers dipped to around 360,000 on a seven-day moving average basis as of Sunday. It was around 362,000 in the same period last week. The on a seven-day moving average number of domestic flights was around 2,700.

Traffic in major metros was lower than 2019 levels, showed data from global location tracking firm TomTom International. Traffic congestion was 43 per cent below 2019 levels in New Delhi and 45 per cent down in Mumbai. The decline had been worse because of festive holidays the previous week.

Different countries have shown different levels of mobility before and after the Covid-19 pandemic took hold, shows data from search engine Google. It uses anonymised location data to track how people are moving during the pandemic. Cross-country comparisons may be affected by regional differences though each country can be compared to its own pre-pandemic mobility. Workplace visits were up 40 per cent in India, 34 per cent in South Africa and 26 per cent in Brazil compared to their respective baseline values before the pandemic took hold. Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States were at levels lower than in early 2020.

Vehicle registrations declined week-on-week, but were over 50 per cent higher than in 2019. There were 565,000 vehicles registered for the week ending 31st October.

Electricity consumption in the country again declined last week but the gap over the 2019 levels widened as decline in generation was even sharper in 2019. The power producers generated 3,565 million units (MU) of electricity per day on average in the latest week based on reporting day data, compared to 3,888 million units per day in the previous week. In comparison, power generation was 2,929 MU per day during the corresponding week in 2019. 

Business Standard has been tracking these indicators since early 2020 to provide a weekly picture of the economy amid the volatility caused by the Covid-19 pandemic. Analysts globally have been using similar indicators as official data is often released with a lag. The traffic data is for Monday 9 a.m., October 31. Google data is as of October 15. All other data is as of Sunday, October 30.

This is the last in the series.