while the Ram Temple's 'pran pratishta' ceremony in Ayodhya is being seen as a pivotal moment in India's political landscape, can Ayodhya finally unlock the unrealised potential of religious tourism in India? That is the question we are asking. Let's look at numbers first - the number of domestic tourists that visited places of pilgrimage in India was 1. 4 million in 2022, while 6.6 million foreign tourists visited India. So, the numbers are big. Now the places of religious tourism earned Rs 1.35 lakh crore in 2022. This is much more than Rs 66 crore in 2021. What is Ayodhya's future?
