Opinion | Lessons from online retail data on our food supply chains
Live MintOn the eve of 25 March, when the first lockdown to deal with the covid crises was announced, it came as an unanticipated shock to India’s economic apparatus. India’s food supply chains suffer from lack of adequate warehousing facilities. As such lockdowns could become a frequently-used tool to deal with infection outbreaks, our analysis portends the possible bottlenecks in food supply chains using online grocery retail data from three Indian metro cities. These results were also confirmed using data on mandi arrivals, where arrival quantities fell by 20% during the first lockdown, but no fall was observed for commodities whose production zones were near the cities. Overall, we have found that supply chains in India disrupted in the aftermath of the first lockdown have since recovered somewhat.