Tracking the economic impact of India’s second covid wave

RIVERS CHANGE course, forests catch flame, glaciers melt: Raj Bhagat Palanichamy of the World Resources Institute India, a research centre, has tracked all of these injuries to India’s landscape through satellite images. In the past year, he has been trying to map a different kind of harm, identifying infection hotspots, pinpointing hospital beds and cross-checking official fatality numbers by examining infrared images of the fires at crematoria.

The murderous toll of India’s second wave of covid-19 infections is impossible to miss but hard to measure. The same is true of its toll on the economy. GDP data for April to June will not be released until the end of August. Figures for industrial production in April will not appear until mid-June and will anyway miss the service sector, which is likely to be hardest hit. India’s government publishes a “periodic” survey of the labour force. But Himalayan glaciers could shrink in the time it takes for it to appear. Hence the keen interest in less conventional indicators of economic activity, such as electricity consumption, mobile-phone data and views from space.