By Dr. Amitabh Ranjan
Booming spiritual tourism in India is a reality but so are the touts, the filth and the fake promises trailing it.
India's spiritual tourism economy is projected to reach around US $60 billion and sustain over a hundred million livelihoods by 2028. There is some freshness in the air; corridors widened, ghats renovated, cruises launched. Over 30 crore tourists to Kashi Vishwanath since 2021 and over 60 crore pilgrims to Maha Kumbh of 2025 in forty-five days; an infrastructure heralding a civilisational tourism revival, has been created not only on paper but also in stone and marble.
Yet, another India greets the tourist when one walks past the corridor's marble facade, one that is rarely mentioned in policy briefings or government press releases; an India of overflowing dustbins near a spiritual hotspot, of a tour guide who quotes one price at the railway station and three times that sum at the destination, of a heritage accommodation which turns out, on arrival at midnight, to be a stinky room with filthy bedsheets and broken washbasins, of families that do not know, until the moment a stampede or a flash flood strikes, whether the authorities have a contingency plan for their safety. This is the hidden half of India's spiritual tourism story and it is high time this story be told as honestly as the brighter half.
The Cleanliness Gap
Namami Gange, the largest and flagship programme for river rejuvenation has witnessed around twenty-two thousand crore rupees spent so far, ghat after ghat genuinely transformed; yet the last mile connectivity; public toilets, lanes leading to ghats, space around the prasad stalls; usually remain someone else's job and therefore none's. The river-basin sewage-treatment statistics hardly matter to the pilgrims, the foul odour of a choked drain on the spot matters. Menstrual and family hygiene facilities, in particular, at sites visited overwhelmingly by women and elderly, are non-issues despite years of policy commitments on these subjects. Sanitation infrastructure funded under Swadesh Darshan and PRASHAD must be matched, rupee for rupee, with a municipal sanitation workforce empowered and paid, to maintain it daily, not only for photoshoots.
The Warning Being Ignored For Long
Two weeks back, a glacier collapse near Nepal-Tibet border triggered a water bomb down the Trishuli river system, killing nearly a thousand and half, leaving around five thousand missing. The same river turns the Gandak and joins the Ganga near Patna; a warning that any corridor built on a Himalayan-fed river stands downstream of a massive mountain system rarely monitored. Even record digital crowd-management preparedness could not prevent Prayagraj stampede of January 2025, providing the same lesson though from a different angle; infrastructure without the enforced carrying capacity is an invite to disaster, not a protection against it. A pilgrimage site is not fully developed until its evacuation plan is as real as its beautification budget.
The Human Component No One Talks About Openly
Ghats can be transformed by government orders, not the guides, agents and hoteliers which is the weakest link in India's spiritual tourism ecosystem. A travel agent bunching an itinerary with a hidden detour to a gift shop for commission, a self-appointed guide attaching himself to a bewildered pilgrim outside a station, the accommodation provider with a website bearing no resemblance to the filthy room finally handed over at midnight; these are not superficial troubles. For the first-time pilgrim, often elderly, travelling with limited cash alongside family, a single bad episode, and all the goodwill generated by a thousand crore rupees ghat infrastructure, goes down the drain. It is word-of-the-mouth publicity; of a cheat hotelier, a rude guide, travelling faster through pilgrim networks than any tourism ministry campaign travelling in the opposite direction.
Market taking precedence over faith deserves an answer. Swadesh Darshan or PRASHAD should approve pilgrimage destinations accompanied with a mandatory, publicly displayed guide-and-agent registration and grievance system; a QR code at the ghat, not a defunct helpline number. The way food safety authorities certify food-joints, tourism departments should certify accommodations alongside actual penalties for fake advertising which is so easy in the present AI world. Change of mindset is essential, not merely cosmetic changes, which requires effective capacity building. Proper training to local guide associations, as partners rather than adversaries, is need of the hour. Licensing must be done with same seriousness as done to ghat lightings and queue management, because a well-lit ghat staffed by a rude, unregulated guide may prove to be a nightmare.
Global best practices, however, show the path. The Vatican's pilgrim-services office makes it a criminal offence to operate as an unlicensed guide or to misrepresent accommodation and the regulation is backed by a visible, trusted grievance channel a first-time visitor can find in minutes. There may not be a need to follow the model in toto, but the underlying principle must be accepted; where the State has invested public money to build the corridor, it owes the pilgrims who walk through it, a comparable investment in the persons allowed to greet them at the other end.
Evolving a Complete Ecosystem
The Arth Ganga model got one thing profoundly right; a river stays clean when the person living beside it, has a livelihood tied to keeping it that way. The same logic must now extend to the human interface of pilgrimage, to the guide, the boatman, the small hotel owner, whose long-term income depends far more on a pilgrim's word-of-mouth than on a single day's overcharge. Convert that incentive into policy; certification instead of harassment, transparent pricing instead of ambush pricing, a real grievance mechanism instead of a suggestion box no one opens. Pair it with sanitation budgets that fund daily upkeep and not just ribbon-cuttings, and with disaster-preparedness plans that treat a Himalayan River as the transboundary, unpredictable system it actually is. India has proven, at Kashi and at Ujjain, that it can build a corridor a pilgrims will remember for its beauty. The unfinished task is building one they will remember for how they were treated, not only by the river and the road, but by the person who greeted them at the gate.
‘Atithi Devo Bhav’ is Indian tradition. A pilgrimage is a promise the pilgrim makes to God. The State's job is to ensure, no one else breaks it on the way.
About the Author: Dr. Amitabh Ranjan, Vice Chairman, PanIIT Alumni India and NESA, Washington DC alum, is Registrar, Indian Institute of Public Administration (IIPA).
Hindusthan Samachar / Indrani Sarkar
