Impact of 2nd wave of Covid-19 on Indian Agriculture — Part 1

He looked at his beloved farm. The sparsely scattered shoots mirrored the lack of clarity in his mind. Should he take a risk and grow the 3rd crop as usual before the preparation for Kharif began? Or should he just let this season pass? He was encouraged by habit, but discouraged by the scars that 2020 had left behind. Just like his farm patch, a bit of clearing was all that his mind needed.

In January this year, we came out with a post titled ‘Agriculture in the times of lockdown’. It was an attempt to see if Simha data can suggest why agriculture grew at 3.4% in the quarter in which India’s overall GDP contracted by 23.9%. And the data did not disappoint. It showed how agriculture bounced back immediately after Junta Curfew, and went on unperturbed, unfazed by the nationwide lockdown.

As the terror of the second wave of Covid-19 spread across India, we were getting more and more requests to check if the effects on agriculture were any different this time. Perhaps the most defining characteristic of the second wave of Covid-19 was its suddenness, which took everyone by surprise. People, especially from Mahindra, wanted to know if there were any surprises to be expected in agriculture as well. And so, we began our analysis.

2021 was very different compared to 2020 when seen from the Carnot data perspective. While our telematics devices were installed across just about 500 tractors in Feb 2020, the number was 5000 in Feb 2021. We also had a rich database of users who had downloaded the Krishi Diary app, and were entering the agricultural transactions regularly. Not only did we have data coming in from tractors, but also mighty harvesters, who easily worked an average of 25 acres a day.

The First-Cut Visualization

To begin our analysis, we performed a simple comparison of 2021 acres vs 2020 acres. Since the number of tractors was significantly different, we normalized the values (avg. acres per tractor). Here are the results:

The first cut visualizations are often misleading!

If you look at the two graphs in the above video, it would appear that 2021 was hands down much better than 2020, for agriculture. But this data didn’t convince us enough. How can the numbers be so different, especially when the pandemic was more devastating in 2021 than in 2020?

An explanation came in from the composition of our fleet. Based on the usage, we had identified rental entrepreneurs or REs (those who rent out tractors for agricultural and haulage work) to be the target audience for our telematics devices, and therefore, their proportion in our fleet had gradually increased. These REs would definitely clock in more acres and hours than people using the tractors just for their own farms. Therefore, a higher proportion of REs in the fleet would push the average up.

Also, the giant harvesters also played their part. The wheat harvesting happened from mid-March to mid-April across India, and each harvester in our fleet clocked an average of 300 acres in that duration. So of course, the averages were bound to be higher.

So with that, we were back to square one. How do we gauge the impact of the second wave then? There was only one way.

Comparing apples with apples

We performed the same exercise as the one above, but this time, we only restricted ourselves to the 500-odd devices that were already installed in 2020. These results seemed to be more palatable.

If we just go by the 2020 fleet, the agricultural activity was unaffected, just like last year. The tractors covered nearly as many acres on an average in 2021, as in 2020.

The data showed the dips on Holi (10th March 2020, and 29th March 2021), Junta curfew (22nd March 2020), and showed a gradual increase as Rabi harvesting approached.

If we look at the haulage guys, the story is slightly different.

If you observe closely, the haulage business was very much affected by the imposition of lockdown last year and took several days to recover. Even in mid-May 2020, it wasn’t back to the pre-lockdown levels. In 2021 however, the story was different.

There was no nationwide lockdown announced in 2021. Different states announced lockdowns at different times, with most of them announcing it in April. Therefore, while the haulage business was recovering from the lockdown shock in April last year, it was in a slight decline in the same period this year.

The Phone Call

The short decline in April notwithstanding, the overall numbers for the haulage business do look better in 2021, as compared to 2020, and the farming business seems unaffected.

So does that mean that tractor owners fared better in 2021 than in 2020? Perhaps. But does aggregate data speak uniformly for the agricultural ecosystem? We thought so until we got on a call with a farmer to understand if the data correlates with the ground reality. And we were surprised.

What we realized was that there were several other aspects of agriculture that we needed to take into consideration.

What were these aspects? Do they change the conclusion? If yes, then how? Head on to Part 2 to find out.

Enjoyed this article? Then be on the lookout for another two weeks later. Till then, for any data-related discussions, feel free to drop us a line at datalabs@carnot.co.in. And don’t forget to follow Data Kisaan on Medium.