PIB TrackerLighthouse visits are up 4.7 times since 2014, to 68 a day per site
A backgrounder counts 205 lighthouses, 75 of them developed for tourism, and 18.63 lakh visitors in 2024-25 against about 4 lakh in 2014.
What happened
- A PIB backgrounder counts 205 lighthouses along a coastline of over 11,000 km, with 75 developed as tourism destinations.
- Lighthouse tourism rose from about 4 lakh visitors in 2014 to 18.63 lakh in 2024-25, with a digital ticketing portal launched under DGLL.
- All lighthouses are solar-powered, and 87 AIS shore stations have been installed on lighthouses along the coast.
- Dedicated lighthouse museums operate at Chennai, Mahabalipuram, Alappuzha, Kannur, Muttom, Dwarka and Gopnath.
- At Mahabalipuram, the first lighthouse of 1887 sat on the roof of the Olakkaneeswar Temple; the present 26-metre tower got a 236-watt LED array in 2020.
For Prelims
- DGLL: the Directorate General of Lighthouses and Lightships, under the Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways, is the central authority for marine aids to navigation along the Indian coast and in the island territories.
- The governing law: the Marine Aids to Navigation Act, 2021 repealed the Lighthouse Act, 1927 and widened the mandate from lighthouses to all aids to navigation, adding vessel traffic services, wreck marking, and training and certification of operators.
- AIS: the Automatic Identification System broadcasts a vessel’s identity, position, course and speed to other ships and to shore stations. It is mandated under SOLAS - the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea, an IMO convention.
- The coastline figure: India’s official coastline was revised from 7,516.6 km to 11,098.81 km in a 2025 circular, after re-measurement at a finer map scale. The coast did not grow; the resolution did - a standard example of the coastline paradox.
- Order of an optic: lighthouse lenses are classified by Fresnel order, first order being the largest and longest-ranged and sixth the smallest, so the "fourth-order optic" at Mahabalipuram describes a mid-sized lens, not a date.
- Why solar suits a lighthouse: the load is small, nocturnal and predictable, and the sites are remote and hard to connect to a grid - which is why navigational aids were among the first public assets to be fully solarised.
- Mahabalipuram: the Pallava port town on the Coromandel coast, a UNESCO World Heritage Site for its rock-cut rathas, cave temples and the Shore Temple - and a reminder that the Pallavas ran maritime trade with Southeast Asia from the seventh century.
- Lighthouse tourism in policy: it sits inside the Sagarmala programme’s coastal community development strand, which is why a navigation directorate is building amphitheatres and selling tickets at all.
For UPSC: A compact set of figures on an asset class that rarely appears in the news and sits at the junction of infrastructure, tourism and maritime safety. Deploy it on infrastructure put to a second use, on coastal tourism and livelihoods under Sagarmala, on AIS and maritime domain awareness, and as a worked example of reading a growth multiple against a per-site average before calling it a success.
What it is NOT: No revenue figure appears anywhere - not ticket income, not the cost of developing a site, not what the 75 developed lighthouses earn or cost to run, so whether lighthouse tourism pays for itself is unanswerable from the release. No State-wise or site-wise visitor breakdown, so the 18.63 lakh could be concentrated at a handful of urban stations. No employment number, though employment is claimed. Nothing on what became of the keepers, and nothing on the 130 lighthouses not developed for tourism - whether they are unsuitable, unfunded or simply next.
For Mains
Syllabus: GS3.9 · GS3.1 · Linkage L2
Anchor
A PIB backgrounder sets out the second life of India’s lighthouses: 205 of them along a coastline of over 11,000 km, 75 developed as tourism destinations, and visitor numbers up from about 4 lakh in 2014 to 18.63 lakh in 2024-25.
Substantiation (data)
The growth is real - 4.7 times in about eleven years, which compounds at roughly 15 per cent a year. The scale is modest: 18.63 lakh visitors spread over 75 developed sites is about 24,800 a year each, or 68 a day. On the working side, every lighthouse is solar-powered and 87 Automatic Identification System shore stations now sit on lighthouse towers, which is the more consequential change.
Position
The useful way to read this is as asset reuse rather than tourism policy. The tower, the land and the staff exist because ships need them; opening the site to visitors adds a revenue stream and a reason to maintain the fabric without adding a new asset. That is the same logic as heritage hotels in disused palaces or walking tracks on decommissioned rail lines, and it is why the per-site visitor average matters less than whether the navigational function is undisturbed.
Substantiation (example)
Mahabalipuram carries the whole argument in one station. The Pallavas ran a port there in the seventh century and a log fire guided vessels in; the first conventional lighthouse was put on the roof of the Olakkaneeswar Temple in 1887 with a wick lamp in a fourth-order optic; the light became three 150-watt metal halide lamps in 2004; and the present 26-metre stone tower was fitted with a 236-watt LED array in 2020. The function never changed, only the technology and now the visitors.
Way forward
The test is the one the release does not set: whether ticket revenue covers the cost of the pathways, gardens and amphitheatres, and whether the 130 lighthouses still closed are being held back by suitability or by money. A digital ticketing portal makes both answerable, because it generates exactly the site-wise data that is missing here.
Conclusion
A navigational directorate has quietly become a tourism operator with 18.63 lakh visitors a year, and has published every number except the one that would show whether it is worth doing.
Deploys into: Infrastructure reuse and coastal tourism · Maritime safety and AIS · Sagarmala and coastal livelihoods · Reading growth multiples against per-unit averages
PIB Backgrounder (Ministry of Ports, Shipping and Waterways) · 2026-10-10 · PRID 2321704 · PIB source ↗