India’s spiritual tourism: The next frontier
Every September 27, World Tourism Day is celebrated around the world to spare a thought to the industry that not only is a money spinner but also connects the world. This year it is hosted by El Salvador, with UN Tourism choosing "Digital Agenda and Artificial Intelligence to Redesign Tourism" as its theme. For India, the day is also a moment to ask a sharper question: is the country monetising the one asset no competitor can copy - its spiritual depth?
The economic case for tourism needs no dressing up. Provisional National Accounts Statistics for 2023-24 put tourism's contribution to India's GDP at 5.22 per cent, and roughly 13 per cent of all employment in the country. The Ministry of Tourism and NITI Aayog jointly project wellness tourism alone could add $18 billion to GDP by 2030.
Yet India is yet to realise its full potential. India ranks 39th of 119 countries - despite scoring in the global top ten for natural, cultural and non-leisure resources, one of only three countries to do so. The gap between resource and rank is exactly where policy must work harder: on connectivity, visa friction, last-mile infrastructure and destination marketing. This is where spirituality becomes strategy, not sentiment. India is the only country on earth that is simultaneously the birthplace of Buddhism, the home of yoga, and a living laboratory of meditation traditions stretching back millennia. Nowhere else can a traveller walk in the Buddha's actual footsteps and take a sunrise yoga class on the same trip.
The Buddhist circuit - Bodh Gaya, Sarnath, Kushinagar, Rajgir, Nalanda, Sravasti - draws only around 1.2 million pilgrim visits a year, a fraction of the world's roughly 500 million Buddhists, concentrated overwhelmingly in Sri Lanka, Thailand, Japan, South Korea and Vietnam. India's hand strengthened considerably this July when Sarnath, where the Buddha delivered his first sermon, was inscribed as the country's 45th UNESCO World Heritage Site. That recognition should be the trigger for a harder push: direct flights into Gaya, Varanasi and Kushinagar from Buddhist-majority countries, a unified multi-country e-visa with Nepal for the Lumbini leg, and monastery-standard stays instead of ad hoc guesthouses. Schemes like Swadesh Darshan and the IRCTC's Buddhist Circuit train must be scale. The yoga and wellness story is, if anything, moving faster than policy can track it. Realising the full value of that lead needs three things New Delhi has only partly delivered: certification standards so a "yoga retreat" or "meditation centre" actually means something to a foreign traveller booking sight unseen; river and ecological safeguards around the Ganga so Rishikesh does not develop itself into the very congestion tourists are fleeing; and a coordinated diplomatic push, riding on the goodwill already built by International Yoga Day, to position yoga and Vedic meditation as India's answer to Japan's onsen tourism or Bali's wellness branding.
This year's World Tourism Day theme of AI and digital tourism is not a distraction from that spiritual case - it is the delivery mechanism. AI-powered translation at Buddhist pilgrimage sites, digital queue and crowd management at Rishikesh's ghats, and app-based authentication of genuine yoga schools would do more for India's spiritual tourism brand than any glossy campaign. The Buddha and the yogi built India's spiritual capital over two millennia; it is now government policy's turn to compound the interest.
The writer is an educator and a columnist; Views presented are personal.
