Travelling in India: a tourist economy built for domestic travellers

Who actually travels in India

India's travel figures are kept in two units that barely compare. The Ministry of Tourism counts domestic tourist visits, meaning trips taken by residents inside the country, and foreign tourist arrivals, meaning people crossing the border. In 2022 those two counts stood at 1,731.01 million and 6.19 million. The domestic count reached a provisional 2,509.63 million in 2023 while the foreign count was still climbing back from the pandemic, having fallen from 10.93 million in 2019 to 1.52 million in 2021.

Two things follow for anybody arriving from outside. The calendar, the crowding and the booking systems answer to domestic demand, so a temple town fills for a festival that no foreign itinerary is organised around, and a hill station fills in May because the plains below it are at 45 °C. And the foreign visitor is a small customer in a very large market, which sets the level of provision at whatever the domestic traveller has already paid for.

The sector's weight in the economy is moderate. Tourism was 4.6% of gross domestic product, and the World Travel and Tourism Council put the 2021 contribution at ₹13.2 lakh crore, about 140 billion US dollars, or 5.8% of output, supporting 32.1 million jobs. The council projected annual growth of 7.8% to around 350 billion US dollars by 2031, at 7.2% of output. Tourism is not a priority sector for the government, and the unevenness of provision away from the main corridors follows from that.

Where foreign arrivals actually land is worth checking against the assumption. Gujarat accounted for 20.17% of foreign tourism in 2022 and drew more than 1.54 million visitors in 2023, a share that has little to do with the monuments a first-time visitor has heard of.

How the monsoon decides when to go

The Indian year is divided into four seasons, and only one of them behaves like a season in the temperate sense. Winter runs through January and February, summer from March to May, the monsoon from June to September, and the post-monsoon period from October to December. Under the Köppen system the country carries six major climatic subtypes, from arid desert in the west to alpine tundra and glaciers in the north and humid tropical rainforest in the southwest and the island territories, so no single sentence about the weather holds across it.

Why the plains empty out in summer

Between March and June most of India runs above 40 °C by day. The coastal regions stay above 30 °C with humidity to match, and the Thar desert passes 45 °C. The highest temperature recorded in the country is 51 °C, at Phalodi in Rajasthan. Those are the months when the domestic traveller goes uphill, which is where the hill station economy came from and why Himalayan towns are busiest at the point in the year when the plains are least usable.

What the monsoon does to a route

The southwest monsoon splits into two arms. The Bay of Bengal arm moves north and crosses northeast India in early June, and the Arabian Sea arm deposits much of its rain on the windward side of the Western Ghats. About two thirds of India's cultivated land depends on those rains. The same rains distend the Brahmaputra beyond its banks, flood the surrounding country in states such as Assam, and turn the Rann of Kutch into a shallow marsh that often floods to knee depth before drying out and parching again once the season ends.

October to March is therefore the workable window across the plains and the south, and the Himalayan high country inverts it. Leh in Ladakh, which the tourism ministry describes as permanently inhabited at that altitude on the planet, is reached over passes such as Rohtang above Manali. Winter has its own obstruction lower down: most of northern India fogs in, temperatures in parts of the plains fall below freezing, and the lowest temperature recorded in the country is −60 °C, at Dras.

Where the six tourism regions differ

The Ministry of Tourism sorts the country into six regions, and the split is uneven in a way that says something about both the geography and the administration.

Central covers two states and the North East covers eight, and the two regions carry nothing like the same volume of traffic. The ministry's own itinerary tool filters by region, by trip length from one or two days up to fourteen and more, and by interest, and the interest list is the useful part of it: wildlife, heritage, spiritual, adventure, gastronomy, weddings, wellness, arts, rural, nature and recreation. Weddings is a tourism category with eight subtypes of its own, from palace weddings to cruise weddings, which is a domestic market being catered for in public.

Why pilgrimage sets the domestic calendar

The spiritual filter on the national tourism portal is subdivided by faith into Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism, Jainism, Christianity and Judaism, and that breakdown is a fair description of what moves people around the country. Religious travel is a large part of what the domestic figure is made of, and it fills most of the places a visitor is likely to have on a list.

Haridwar in Uttarakhand hosts the Kumbh Mela, which the tourism ministry describes as world famous. Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh works as a permanent version of the same thing, with the ghats along the river, the Tulsi Manas Mandir where the poet-saint Goswami Tulsidas wrote the Ramcharitmanas, and Sarnath just outside it, where the Ashokan pillar that inspired the national emblem was originally erected. The Sri Venkateswara Swamy Vaari Temple at Tirupati in Andhra Pradesh prepares an average of more than 2.8 lakh laddus a day as prasadam, about 280,000, which is a clearer measure of throughput than any visitor count. Sri Harmandir Sahib in Amritsar draws Sikh pilgrimage into a city that also holds the Attari-Wagah border ceremony, a synchronised parade by Indian and Pakistani soldiers.

The Buddhist circuit is a separate itinerary running through the same states: the Mahabodhi Temple Complex at Bodh Gaya, inscribed by UNESCO in 2002, the archaeological site of Nalanda Mahavihara in Bihar, inscribed in 2016, and the ancient Buddhist site of Sarnath, inscribed in 2026.

Festivals are filtered on the same portal by month and by state, which is the honest way to present them. Apart from the three national occasions there is no single national festival season, and a visitor planning around one is planning around a calendar that changes with the state line and the faith of the town.

What the heritage list actually holds

India had 45 properties on the UNESCO World Heritage List as of 2026, against 42 in August 2023, and 69 more on its tentative list. The balance between the categories is the part that shapes an itinerary.

Thirty-seven of the forty-five are cultural, so the list steers a visitor towards buildings and archaeology while the biological interest sits in a much shorter column. It is also not a list confined to antiquity. Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus in Mumbai was inscribed in 2004 and the Victorian Gothic and Art Deco Ensembles around it in 2018, Le Corbusier's work at Chandigarh was inscribed in 2016 as part of a transnational property, and Santiniketan in West Bengal in 2023. The Mountain Railways of India were inscribed in stages in 1999, 2005 and 2008, and they remain a working transport service that a visitor can simply travel on.

Recent additions have moved away from the Mughal and colonial core that the early inscriptions established: the Moidams of the Ahom dynasty in Assam in 2024, the Sacred Ensembles of the Hoysalas in 2023, Dholavira, a Harappan city in Gujarat, in 2021, and the Maratha Military Landscapes in 2025.

Why permits still close parts of the country

Most nationalities need a visa arranged before travelling, and nationals of Bhutan, the Maldives and Nepal do not need one at all. Citizens of Afghanistan, Argentina, Bangladesh, Jamaica, Mauritius, Mongolia, South Africa and Uruguay, among others, pay no fee for one.

How the electronic visa changed the numbers

The online route opened in November 2014, when a visa on arrival backed by an Electronic Travel Authorisation obtained beforehand was introduced at 28 international airports. It was renamed the e-Tourist Visa in April 2015, extended to citizens of 74 countries, then to China, Macau and Hong Kong on 30 July 2015 and to 36 further countries on 15 August 2015, and it reached 156 countries. Applications run from four to thirty days before travel, the visa allows a stay of ninety days, or 180 days for citizens of the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan and Canada, and it can be obtained twice in a calendar year. The effect was immediate: 56,477 tourists arrived on an e-Tourist Visa in October 2015, against 2,705 arrivals in October 2014, the month before the facility existed.

Where a permit is still needed

A visa is not sufficient everywhere. A Protected Area Permit is required for Nagaland and Sikkim and for parts of Arunachal Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Jammu and Kashmir, Manipur, Mizoram, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand. A Restricted Area Permit is required for the Andaman and Nicobar Islands and for parts of Sikkim. Lakshadweep needs a special permit of its own. Those are the frontier states and the island territories, and the regime is the reason an itinerary through the North East takes more preparation than one of the same length through the South.

How visitors move around the country

Indian Railways carries around 3% of gross domestic product and employs 1.31 million people, which makes the network a public institution before it is a transport option. As of July 2023, 90% of the track was electrified, and the modernisation plan targets 475 Vande Bharat trainsets over four years. For a foreign visitor the railway is where the domestic market becomes visible, because the trains are that market in motion.

Roads carry more than 85% of passenger traffic across a network of over 6.6 million km as of early 2025. Air travel recorded 158 million passengers in 2017, and the airport count has moved quickly: 75 new airports were built in the ten years to 2024, taking the total to 149 including helipads and aerodromes, with around 153 operational airports managed by the Airports Authority of India as of 2024, among them 29 international ones, against 74 airports under that authority in 2014. Metro rail runs in Delhi, Mumbai, Navi Mumbai, Kolkata, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Kochi, Gurgaon, Jaipur, Noida, Pune, Nagpur, Kanpur, Ahmedabad and Lucknow, with further systems intended for cities including Agra, Varanasi and Patna. The World Bank records the same decade as one of substantial infrastructure expansion alongside a fall in extreme poverty from 16.2% in 2011-12 to 2.3% in 2022-23. India drives on the left.

What India sells beyond its monuments

Medical travel is a documented industry with its own figures. India's travel healthcare market was worth around 9 billion US dollars in 2019, within a global travel healthcare industry of 44.8 billion US dollars, and 184,298 foreign patients travelled to India for treatment in 2014. The wellness market beside it is promoted by the ministry under four headings, yoga, ayurveda, meditation and naturopathy, and towns such as Haridwar are known for ayurvedic medicine and wellness centres as much as for pilgrimage.

Astronomical tourism has grown as of 2025, around the Indian Astronomical Observatory at Hanle in Ladakh, other dark-sky preserves in the Himalayas, and sites in the Andaman Islands. The seven natural World Heritage properties are national parks and reserves: Kaziranga and Manas in Assam, Keoladeo, the Sundarbans, Nanda Devi and Valley of Flowers, the Great Himalayan National Park Conservation Area, and the Western Ghats, a biodiversity hotspot holding a large proportion of the country's flora and fauna, much of it found nowhere else.

Elephant riding remains available at historic sites, and it has become a contested activity. About 350 elephants were used for tourism in India in 2017, against almost 2,200 in Thailand. In early 2019 tour operators including Responsible Travel and Intrepid Travel stopped selling tours that included elephant rides, and later that year the Association of British Travel Agents updated its animal welfare guidelines to label elephant riding unacceptable.

The ministry also promotes a rural tourism list built out of single villages, among them Sarmoli in Uttarakhand, Reiek in Mizoram, Kanthalloor in Kerala, Madla in Madhya Pradesh and Dawar in Jammu and Kashmir. That programme is the clearest signal of where official effort is going, which is towards spreading a very large domestic market over more of the country instead of concentrating it further on the places that already fill up. India's India: geography explains why those places are as far apart as they are.