PIB Tracker48 of every 100 overnight trips are pilgrimage, and 30 are medical
MoSPI's tourism survey found the most expensive domestic trip is the one taken for treatment - Rs 29,454 in rural India, Rs 41,649 in urban.
What happened
- MoSPI released the Domestic Tourism Expenditure Survey, NSS 80th round, conducted July 2025 - June 2026.
- Report title: "Domestic Tourism in India", compiled by the National Statistics Office.
- Long-recall (365 days) leading purposes: pilgrimage 48%, health and medical 30%.
- Short-recall (30 days): social 89%; business trips record the highest average spend at Rs 5,949.
- Same-day trips: social 33%, shopping 26% - with shopping taking the largest expenditure share in both sectors.
For Prelims
- DTES: the Domestic Tourism Expenditure Survey, conducted by the National Statistics Office as part of the NSS 80th round, July 2025 to June 2026.
- Two recall periods: 365 days for holidaying, pilgrimage, health and shopping; 30 days for business, social, education and others. Same-day trips use 30 days.
- Tourist household: a household reporting at least one overnight trip in the reference period - the denominator for the trips-per-100 figures.
- The purpose split (365-day): pilgrimage 48%; health and medical 30%; second place is health 38.4% rural and leisure 36.4% urban.
- Expenditure ranking: health and medical trips cost most (Rs 29,454 rural, Rs 41,649 urban); business tops the 30-day set at Rs 5,949.
- Mode and stay: rural - bus 32%, and other non-commercial stays 28%; urban - train 35%, and hotels and guesthouses 36%.
- State shares of visitor-trips: Uttar Pradesh 15.7%, Tamil Nadu 13.4%, Rajasthan 8.0%.
- Seasonality: May and October are the peak months for holidaying, leisure and recreation travel.
For UPSC: The best current data on what Indians actually travel for, and it contradicts the way tourism policy is usually discussed. Use it on the tourism economy and religious circuits, on healthcare access where the cost of the medical trip is the argument, and on survey-based statistics, where the two recall periods explain why "social" and "pilgrimage" both appear to dominate depending on which table you read.
What it is NOT: The survey gives shares and average expenditures but no aggregate: there is no total domestic tourism expenditure figure, no contribution to GDP and no employment estimate, so its economic weight cannot be sized from this release. Trips per 100 tourist households is a ratio among households that already travelled, not a measure of how many households travel at all, so it understates exclusion. The health and medical expenditure figures are trip costs and the release does not say whether treatment costs are included or excluded. There is no income or consumption-class breakdown anywhere, so who takes these trips is unknown. And the 2014-15 comparison is given only for the trips-per-100 figures, not for purpose shares or expenditure, so composition change over the decade cannot be traced.
For Mains
Syllabus: GS3.1 · GS1.6 · Linkage L2
Anchor
Forty-eight of every hundred long-recall overnight trips in India are taken for pilgrimage and thirty for medical treatment. Those two purposes together are 78 per cent of the category. Holidaying, leisure and recreation - what the word tourism ordinarily means - is a minority of Indian domestic travel.
Substantiation (data)
The expenditure table makes the second finding sharper than the first. Health and medical trips cost more than any other category: Rs 29,454 in rural areas and Rs 41,649 in urban. By comparison, the business trips that top the 30-day table average Rs 5,949. The most expensive journey an Indian household takes is the one to reach a doctor.
Position
Read the pilgrimage share as infrastructure guidance rather than as culture. Forty-eight per cent of overnight trips moving along religious circuits tells you where road, rail, sanitation and accommodation investment will actually be used, and it explains the state-level pattern: Uttar Pradesh at 15.7 per cent of visitor-trips and Tamil Nadu at 13.4 are the two largest temple economies in the country.
Counterpoint
The medical figure is not a tourism statistic at all. A rural household spending Rs 29,454 to travel for treatment is measuring the distance between where people live and where specialist care exists - and that sum is travel and stay, before any treatment cost. Set it against the Rs 15,321 average Ayushman Bharat hospitalisation claim and the access problem is larger than the financing one.
Problematisation
The survey cannot size any of this. No total expenditure, no GDP contribution, no employment estimate, and no income-class breakdown appear. Trips per 100 tourist households counts only households that already travelled, so households that never travel are outside the denominator entirely - which is precisely the group a poverty or access argument needs.
Conclusion
The useful reframing is that India's domestic travel is mostly obligation rather than leisure - faith and illness, not holidays. Policy written for a leisure tourist is policy written for the smaller half of the market.
Deploys into: Tourism economy and religious circuits · Healthcare access and out-of-pocket travel cost · Survey methodology and recall periods · Transport demand and modal choice
Ministry of Statistics & Programme Implementation · 2026-09-23 · PRID 2313894 · PIB source ↗