57% Indians say that “COVID-19 -The situation concerns me hugely”. There is still optimism for a rapid recovery but that faith is being contradicted by the way people wish to stock up essential items at this point, in attempt to prepare for the worst.

Kantar is a UK-based company which deals with data, insights and consultation. It recently conducted an online survey in India where it received responses from people in 19 cities and 15 states. The survey aimed at studying the prevalent beliefs and opinions among people, as the coronavirus pandemic continues to spread.

Concerns
Indians are more worried about the disruptions in daily life as compared to being anxious about their health as 45% people were highly concerned by day-to-day disruptions while 31% Indians were highly concerned about their health. The concern for daily disruptions trumps over worrying about being financial prepared (47%) and economic recession (18%).

Hygiene
India is seeing an increased focus on health and hygiene with 91% people washing hands more often now and 47% Indian households claiming increased toilet cleaning, more so in rural (49%) vs urban (43%). 19% people have revealed that they bought a hand sanitizer and 17% bought hand wash, for the first time.

Travel
People are also highly anxious about using public transport at this point as 55% say that they wish to completely stop commuting by public transport. Taxi and other such services have fared better in comparison with 41% wish to use less of them. During this period, people are more trusting of private vehicles as 32% wish to use more of them.

Domestic travel is again something that people wish to completely avoid. In that space there is not much of a difference between completely stopping traveling by air (58%) and traveling by trains (57%).

77% have deferred their vacation plans, 64% have deferred automobile buying decisions.

Expenditure
Their global survey involved responses from countries like Italy, UK, South Korea, USA, France and Germany. When compared to all, India (51%) is most anxious about facing scarcity of daily use items, followed by US (33%), Germany (24%) and South Korea (24%).

Following the same belief, 28% Indians have said that they have significantly reduced their spends across physical as well as online formats, compared to last month. People are now moving towards basics and they're opting to buy more of  daily need items. Most of the expenditure is directed towards personal cleaning products like soaps, handwashes, sanitizers (67%), followed by antiseptic liquids, anti-bacterial liquids and wipes (63%). People are increasingly unwilling to spend on food delivery (63%), non-alcoholic beverages (48%) and alcoholic drinks (56%).

As several people are opting for purchasing essential items online, 26% have bought medicines online for the first time in last 20 days and there is an increased preference for using electronic payment. 68% prefer to now pay by card, net banking, avoiding cash/notes/coins, etc.

Brands
People are quite unwilling to experiment with their purchase choices as 59% say that they will continue using the same brand as always. So currently, loyalty to the brand is all time high. It is also very clear what people want from products advertisements - people at this point expect the advertisements to show that the product is helpful in the new everyday life (79%), Inform about their efforts to face the situation (77% ) and not exploit the crisis in anyway  to promote themselves (71%).

So at this point as Indians live in a lockdown, the biggest takeaway is that people are more focused towards fulfilling their basic day to day needs as that is what concerns them more than anything. People are also not willing to travel much and are more focused towards maintaining good hygiene.