BENGALURU: How strictly is India following the lockdown? The movement of people from two major satellite towns to cities —
Ghaziabad to Delhi and Thane to Mumbai — fell by about 92% and 85%, respectively, over the last one month as the entire country went under lockdown. Data shows that movement across these two corridors — as both Delhi and Mumbai are among the worst-hit metros — has consistently come down from the first week of March as people started getting cautious and companies shut down offices even before the nationwide
lockdown
was announced on March 25.
The data shows movement from the first week of March (March 2-8) pre-lockdown to last week of the first phase lockdown 1.0 (April 6-12). From about 10% of the people in Thane also being seen in Mumbai during the first week of March, the number went down to 1.5% in mid-April, according to aggregated location data from smartphones shared with TOI by San Francisco-based government technology startup
Lotadata
. This number from Ghaziabad to Delhi went down from 35.2% to 2.9%. It also shows that movement from Mumbai to Thane and Delhi to Ghaziabad also fell by 92% and 94%, respectively.
Data from MapmyIndia, a location and mapping services provider to large auto and logistics companies, also saw a 97% fall in vehicle movements between Ghaziabad and Delhi and a 90% fall between Thane and Mumbai from March 4 to April 15, indicating a similar trend. It saw over 80% fall in traffic across the country immediately after the March 25 lockdown, according to CEO
Rohan Verma.
More on Covid-19A recent report on Google Mobility Trends also shows an 80% drop in movement at retail and recreation spots (restaurants, shopping centres), 69% fall at transit stations and 64% fall at workplaces in India between February 29 and April 11. On other visits to grocery and pharma stores, which fell by 65% from 29 to March 29, reversed a bit to 55% by April 11, indicating that visits to stock up are increasing.
Lotadata works with “thousands of smartphone apps” across gaming, e-commerce and social networking to gather anonymised data on people’s movement and has been working with city governments in the US, Europe and Singapore. The data does not include personal information like name or mobile number and the insights gathered by the company are aggregated. According to its founder Apurva Kumar, Lotadata has over 50% coverage in Delhi-NCR and Greater Mumbai area, which means that it has data movement half the known population of the specified region at least once a month.
For the large majority, it is measured once a week at least, according to Kumar, a
Stanford University
postgraduate who has worked in
Silicon Valley
for over two decades, including at Hewlett-Packard.
Lotadata has been using data gathered for urban planning like it was working with a European energy utility company on where to set up solar farms. After Covid-19 started spreading, it has provided data to governments in Italy and Spain via its clients in Europe through its initiative called Citydash, which is now sharing data for 12 countries for free.
Besides the movement across cities, Lotadata is also analysing micro-movements between neighbourhoods in cities. As an example, public health and law enforcement authorities can easily scan for the anonymised and aggregated presence and movement of people in a hotspot in Delhi and track the dispersion of that cohort through within NCR. This can then be used to prepare authorities on which neighbourhoods to keep a watch and boost healthcare capacity.
“There is no need to go about tracing individuals necessarily,” added Kumar, whose startup is governed by Europe’s GDPR and
California
’s privacy laws. “As the movement control policies have become stricter in India in April, we will continue to measure Greater Mumbai, NCR and all 53 metros, cities and towns.”