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NEW DELHI :
How have the Indians been dealing with the blockade in the past few weeks? Are they more anxious than their peers elsewhere? Are they more or less concerned about jobs?
To find answers, we, like most Indians on the net, turned to Google. Google Trends data gives a clear idea of what’s on people’s minds, and social scientists are increasingly using it to measure trends in real time.
Google Trends data suggests that stress levels in India skyrocketed during the blockade, with stress-seeking levels exceeding those of other countries that were under blockade in recent weeks. And along with stress, searches for therapy have also increased in the country.
Data from other sources also suggests increased anxiety and mental health problems during closure. A recent survey by the Indian Psychiatric Society suggests a 20% increase in cases related to mental illness due to uncertainties related to issues such as finances, work, health and stress in relationships.
Therapy searches have been relatively higher on the Andaman and Nicobar, Mizoram and Puducherry islands during the shutdown period, Google Trends data shows. Such searches have been relatively low in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan.
Suicide searches have been relatively low. On March 29, reports of the murder of German Finance Minister Thomas Schaefer had led to an increase in the search term “suicide”, but other than that, searches have been low.
Job-related searches have been relatively high in India compared to other countries. Data from the Monitoring Center for the Indian Economy (CMIE) suggest a sharp rise in unemployment immediately after the blockade went into effect. The urban unemployment rate has risen sharply and remains high, and many of those who are out of work, or have precarious jobs, may have been searching hard for jobs online in recent weeks.
For those who still have a job and were supposed to report virtually, finding tools to connect with their workplaces became the key challenge. Look out for apps like Zoom that allows people to connect to their computers that were shot immediately after the crash. Zoom searches were relatively higher in countries like Germany and Italy, compared to blockade developing countries like Indonesia, South Africa and India in recent weeks.
The blockade also meant more time for people on long trips. And with time on their hands, most Internet surfers in India turned to experimenting with various recipes, and recipe searches increased faster in India than in many other countries. Searches for recipes overshadowed those for online training or classes in the country, with the highest search interest in Goa, Daman & Diu and Karnataka.
YouTube video searches have also increased in recent weeks, and Indians searched YouTube relatively more than in other countries. In comparison, Netflix and Amazon Prime searches were relatively quiet across the country.
In general, network dependency may have increased only during blocking, and the drive toward further digitization may have received another boost from covid-19.
Immediately after the blockade was announced to contain the contagion, searches for “internet shutdown” began to increase as people worried about losing one of the few windows to the outside world. As panic subsided, people turned to the web to search for both what they loved and what they worried about, data from Google Trends suggests.
