Recovery tracker: Improvement in power, freight volumes and revenue

Traffic still down by nearly a fifth from 2019 levels

Electricity generation and Indian Railways numbers rallied after trending downward in the recent past.

Power generation showed an uptick last week both week-on-week and also compared to 2020 and 2019 levels. Power utilities across the country generated over 3,900 million units of electricity on average per day during the week ending September 26, 2021, This was over 2 per cent higher than the corresponding week in 2020 and more than 8 per cent higher than 2019. Growth had been in negative territory in the previous week (see chart 1).

The Indian Railways showed higher growth in terms of both goods carried and the corresponding revenue earned. The quantity of goods carried was up 4.9 per cent compared to the same week in 2020. It was 0.3 per cent in the previous week. Freight revenue grew at 10.3 per cent (compared to 8 per cent in the previous week), showed the latest figures (see chart 2).

There was also an increase in workplace visits. Search engine Google tracks mobility based on anonymized location data. This is used to see how people are moving during the pandemic across the world.  The data is released with a lag. The latest is as of September 21. Workplace visits rose to 90.7 per cent of normal compared to 86.9 per cent in the previous week (see chart 3).

Business Standard also tracks emissions of nitrogen dioxide. It comes from industrial activity and vehicles. A rise would suggest more economic activity and a fall would point to a dip in momentum. Emissions in Delhi improved over the previous week. Levels were nearly 77 per cent of normal levels compared to around 74 per cent in the previous week. Mumbai emissions growth, based on Bandra locality data, fell during the week (see chart 4,5).

Traffic congestion was down by 17 per cent in major cities compared to 2019 levels, showed data from global location technology firm TomTom International.  It was down by over 80 per cent in both cities at their lowest in 2021 (see chart 6).

Business Standard tracks these indicators as a way of getting a current sense of how the economy is doing. Official macroeconomic data is often released with lag. Analysts globally have been tracking similar indicators as a means of understanding the immediate economic impact of the Covid-19 pandemic in different countries.  Google data is the only one which is released with a lag. It is as of September 21. All other data is as of Sunday, 26th September.