Recovery tracker: Mobility on the rise, vehicle registrations up 8.7%

Railways showed a moderation in freight growth numbers

People stepped out of their homes more than before with multiple mobility indicators showing a rise.

Retail and recreation visits were higher than the previous week, shows mobility data from search engine Google. It uses anonymised location data to track peoples’ movements during the pandemic. Movement is categorised by the kind of place visited. Workplace visits trended higher for the latest week. Visits to parks were near their highest since the pandemic began.

Indians registered more vehicles than before. There were a total of 395,022 vehicles registered during the latest week. This is 8.7 per cent higher than the same period in 2019. The overall numbers have trended higher for the first time in weeks. Recent weeks had seen lower registrations than in 2019.

Power utilities across the country generated 4,718 million units of electricity on average per day during the week ended June 5, 2022, based on reporting day numbers. Generation was up 14.6 per cent from 4,119 MUs during the corresponding week in 2019, and rose 8 per cent week-on-week.

People continued to take flights in steady numbers during the latest week. An average of more than 350,000 people took a domestic flight every day, in line with previous weeks, with over 2,700 flights taking off every day.

The Indian Railways’ freight numbers grew at a slower rate than before. The quantity of goods carried was up 9.36 per cent compared to 17.71 per cent in the previous week. The money it made from carrying these goods was up 16.8 per cent, compared to 22.96 per cent in the previous week.

Major cities continued to see lower traffic than was the norm before the pandemic.  Monday morning 9am Mumbai traffic was 50 per cent lower than in 2019. It was down 49 per cent in New Delhi.

Business Standard tracks these indicators to get a weekly picture of the economy. Official government data is often released with a lag. Analysts globally have been tracking similar indicators to see how economies are affected by multiple waves of the pandemic, and government restrictions imposed to control its spread.

The Google data is released with a lag. The latest is as of June 1. The traffic data is as of Monday morning 9am on 6th June. All other data is as of Sunday, June 5.