What Google data tells us about India’s economic recovery

India’s economy is struggling to overcome the adverse hit from the world’s biggest lockdown, a series of high-frequency indicators show.

From power consumption to jobs to Google’s mobility trends, the figures show activity has picked up from the record slump registered in April, but the recovery has a long way to go.

In the absence of official figures, economists are increasingly turning to alternative data sets to get a better sense of how Asia’s third-largest economy is coping with the coronavirus pandemic. The strict stay-at-home measures have almost paralyzed official data collection, with the government failing to publish headline consumer price figures for April and May. The last report on factory output data was for March, with the statistics office suspending field surveys because of the lockdown.