Recovery tracker: Power generation moderates but more people back at work

Traffic picks up in major cities, personal mobility and use of public transport increases

After displaying positive signals as Covid cases came down, weekly indicators of economic activity are now showing some moderation as rising coronavirus infections trigger the fear of a third wave.
 
Power generation continues to show gains over 2019 but the demand moderated on a weekly basis. Railway freight data, too, moved the same way. Mobility, traffic and emissions, however, showed signs of recovery, though more in some parts of the country than others.
 

Power generation moderated week-on-week as monsoon rains picked up the pace, bringing down power demand for cooling and irrigation. Restricted shopping hours in major economic centres such as Maharashtra also played a part. In all, 4,158 million units of electricity were generated in India on a seven-day rolling average basis for the week ending Sunday, July 18, down 6 per cent from the previous week. The latest week’s numbers are 8.3 per cent higher than the corresponding period in 2019, and 10.8 per cent higher than the same week in 2020. Year 2019 is used since it predates Covid-19 hitting India (see chart 1).
 

Personal mobility and use of public transport increased further from last week as more people visited their workplaces. Overall visits, however, remained below 2019 levels. Workplace visits are back to almost 79 per cent of pre-Covid days. This mobility data, from search engine Google which tracks people’s movements based on anonymised location data, is released with a lag and is as of July 14. Essential shopping, including grocery and pharmacy, visits were 21.4 per cent above normal but retail and recreation visits remained down 24.4 per cent; and visits to parks were down 11.4 per cent. Commuting also remained depressed and was down 11.9 per cent on average. All these numbers, however, show improvement on a weekly basis (see chart 2).
 

Traffic has also picked up in major cities. New Delhi traffic was 73 per cent back to normal, while Mumbai’s was at 71 per cent of pre-Covid days. Both figures are at their best since February this year. Traffic congestion data is based on statistics from global location technology firm TomTom International. New Delhi’s relative traffic recovery overtook Mumbai’s over the last fortnight (see chart 3).
 

The Indian Railways, meanwhile, carried 20.4 per cent more goods (in terms of tonnage) during the week ending Sunday, July 18, than in the same period last year. Earnings from the goods carried were up 23.8 per cent per cent (see chart 4). Both figures were, however, lower than in the previous week.
 

Business Standard also tracks nitrogen dioxide emissions, which come from industrial activity and vehicles. Levels had dropped as India went into lockdown in 2020. Delhi emissions last week were 14 per cent lower than the 2019 levels based on a seven-day rolling average basis. But Mumbai’s were 39.1 per cent higher than the corresponding week in 2019, indicating greater level of vehicular traffic and industrial activity (see charts 5, 6).
 

Business Standard tracks these weekly indicators to get a sense of how the economy is currently doing. Official macroeconomic numbers are often released with a lag. Analysts globally have been tracking similar indicators as different countries went into lockdown to control the Covid-19 pandemic.
 
India reported 38,164 Covid-19 cases on July 18, slightly lower than the average number of cases in the previous seven days. Daily cases were over 400,000 in the first week of May.