Religious tourism in India is not simply a matter of visiting sites — it is an encounter with a sacred geography that, in significant measure, is the country itself — a sacred geography of extraordinary density where pilgrimage routes older than most nations’ entire histories crisscross a landscape layered with temple, river, mountain, and forest, each bearing its own specific spiritual identity and significance. More than 700 million Indians undertake at least one pilgrimage journey each year. The Kumbh Mela draws more human beings to a single location than any other event in human history. The ghats of Varanasi receive tens of thousands of daily visitors. The Triveni Sangam at Prayagraj is the destination of millions of pilgrims annually — and every major Hindu festival multiplies that number many times over.
Into this landscape, in the past three decades, has arrived the full apparatus of modern tourism: tour operators, travel aggregators, online booking platforms, luxury hotel chains, influencer travel culture, and the globalised expectation that one should be able to book a spiritual experience as easily as a hotel room. The results have been, to put it plainly, complicated.
On one side, this modernisation has made sacred India more accessible than ever before to more people — including diaspora communities maintaining ancestral connections and international visitors drawn to yoga, meditation, and Vedic philosophy. On the other, it has created a set of pressures on sacred sites, local communities, and the integrity of religious traditions that deserve honest examination.
This essay is Prayag Pandits’ contribution to that examination. We do not pretend to have all the answers. But as an organisation that has been operating at India’s most sacred pilgrimage sites for years, serving thousands of devotees across many traditions and nationalities, we have developed views about what ethical religious tourism looks like — and what it does not look like. We share those views here, not as a sermon, but as a genuine conversation that we believe the industry, the devotees, and the sites themselves need to have.
Defining the Terms: What is Religious Tourism, and What Makes it Ethical?
The phrase “religious tourism” itself deserves interrogation. For the millions of Hindus who travel to Prayagraj for Pind Daan at the Sangam, or to Gaya for ancestral rites at the Vishnupad Temple, or to Varanasi to perform the last rites for a departed parent at the ghats of the Ganga — this is not tourism. It is not even accurately called “religious tourism.” It is pilgrimage: a sacred journey undertaken not for recreation or cultural enrichment but for spiritual fulfilment, ritual obligation, and devotional expression. The motivations, the internal state, the relationship to the sacred site, and the consequences of the journey are fundamentally different from tourism.
Yet the infrastructure that serves both the pilgrim and the tourist is increasingly the same. The same hotels, the same transport, often the same tour operators. And it is precisely this convergence that creates the ethical tensions we are examining.
The Tourist and the Pilgrim: Two Different Relationships to the Sacred
The distinction between tourist and pilgrim is not a matter of religion or even of stated purpose — it is a matter of stance. A tourist (in the relevant sense) approaches a sacred site as a consumer of experience: something to be photographed, understood, enjoyed, and departed from. The sacred site is an object; the tourist is a subject who encounters it and moves on.
A pilgrim is in a different relationship. The pilgrim comes not to extract an experience but to offer one — to surrender something, whether time, comfort, money, or ego. The sacred site is not an object but a subject — a place that is alive, that receives the devotee’s offering, that may transform the one who comes in genuine humility. The Ganga at Prayagraj does not merely flow past the pilgrim; the pilgrim enters the Ganga, is immersed by it, and is changed by the immersion.
This distinction matters enormously for how we think about the ethics of presence at sacred sites. The ethical question is not simply “what are the rules?” but “what is the stance?” A person of any religious background who approaches a Hindu temple with genuine reverence and curiosity is, in the relevant sense, closer to the pilgrim than to the extractive tourist. A Hindu who arrives at a sacred site for a selfie and leaves without engaging with the tradition is closer to the extractive tourist than to the pilgrim.
The Problem of Commercial Exploitation at Sacred Sites
Perhaps the most visible ethical challenge in India’s religious tourism landscape is the problem of exploitation — of pilgrims by unscrupulous service providers, of sacred sites by commercial interests, and of local communities by outside tour operators who extract economic value while contributing little to the community itself.
Exploitation of Pilgrims: The Pandit Problem
At every major pilgrimage site in India, the devout pilgrim — often from a rural background, often performing these rites for the first time, often emotionally vulnerable due to recent bereavement — faces a gauntlet of individuals offering pandit services of wildly varying quality and price. The exploitation takes several forms:
- Price escalation: Pilgrims from outside the local area are often charged prices many times higher than what local residents would pay for the same service. At pilgrimage sites during peak seasons, unscrupulous operators exploit emotional states to extract maximum payment.
- Incomplete or incorrect rituals: Pandits who are not properly trained may conduct rituals incorrectly, using wrong mantras, skipping prescribed elements, or performing an abbreviated version of the ritual without disclosing this to the pilgrim.
- Fictitious credentials: Some operators claim associations with specific temples, lineages, or certification bodies that do not exist or are entirely informal.
- Persistent harassment: The practice of loudly soliciting pilgrims as they approach ghats or temple entrances — pursuing them, blocking their path, and insisting on providing services — is a pervasive problem that degrades the spiritual atmosphere for everyone.
These are not merely economic problems — they are spiritual ones. A pilgrim who has been overcharged, misled, or subjected to an incorrect ritual has been harmed in a dimension that matters enormously to them. And the cumulative effect of widespread exploitation is the erosion of trust in the very institutions — pandits, priests, ritual specialists — that are the living carriers of the tradition.
The Commodification of Sacred Experience
Beyond individual exploitation, there is a structural problem: the pressure to turn sacred experience into a packaged product. The market logic of tourism demands that experiences be standardised, scalable, and time-efficient. A Pind Daan ritual that properly takes two to three hours is compressed into forty-five minutes. A ceremony that should be performed in meditative quiet is conducted amid a crowd of dozens of other groups being processed simultaneously. The mantra recitation becomes a murmur rather than a deliberate invocation. The ritual form is preserved; the spirit is attenuated.
This is one of the most insidious forms of religious tourism’s impact on the tradition: not the elimination of rituals but their evacuation of meaning through industrialisation. When Pind Daan in Varanasi becomes a high-throughput processing operation rather than an act of genuine ancestral propitiation, something has been lost — even if no one has technically done anything wrong.