After a recent temple stampede in Andhra Pradesh and pilgrim bus crash in Rajasthan, the perils of religious tourism have come sharply into focus. For a country where pilgrimages dominate the tourism economy, why aren’t we better prepared for it?
After going through the stampede at Maha Kumbh Mela, Somalin Panda wishes to never return there. PIC/NITIN JADHAV
The air at the Maha Kumbh Mela this year was thick with dust, heat, and the hum of a million prayers when Somalin Panda realised something was wrong. The crowd around her, restless after hours of waiting under the sun, began to surge in all directions. With routes closed for VIP passage for hours on end, and no police or signage to guide the pilgrims, the hordes broke out into inevitable mayhem. “People just started running, some forward, some backward, and that’s when the crush began,” Panda recalls. She could hear screams, see slippers and shawls trampled into the mud, and feel bodies pressing in from every side. “I thought I would die of suffocation, even though it was an open space.”
Somalin Panda at Maha Kumbh Mela
It took her 12 hours to make it back to safety, wading through heaps of abandoned clothes and shoes, and an eerie silence in the aftermath of the stampede. While the Kumbh Mela turned devotion into disarray for Panda, elsewhere in India, similar scenes of peril played out at various places of pilgrimage. In Andhra Pradesh, a temple stampede on November 1 killed nine devotees. Just a day later in Rajasthan, a minibus crash killed 15 pilgrims. Such incidentsbring home the uncomfortable truth of just how poorly prepared the country is for spiritual tourism, despite faith driving a lion’s share of domestic travel here.
India saw roughly 143 crore domestic religious-tourist visits in 2022, accounting for over 60 per cent of domestic travel according to a 2024 Travtalk report. Yet infrastructure, crowd control and safety planning lag dangerously behind. At the same time, costs are spiralling. Hotels and transport are pricier, donation expectations are higher, and for many the only way to “cut the queue” is by paying through their nose for helicopter rides or VIP access. The act of devotion is increasingly bound up with both risk and expense.
For Sanjukta Banerjee, her belief in Bappa came with the price tag of a 17-hour wait. The crowd at Parel’s Lalbaugcha Raja during Ganeshotsav this year reminded her of the chaos of Vaishno Devi or Haridwar, only with more privilege than piety. “Every few hours, the darshan line would stop for VIPs and VVIPs. Is my faith not as important as theirs?” she asks. When her turn came, she could only brush her hand against the idol’s feet before being pushed away by the bouncers. In the face of privilege, every crowd plan and fairness ideal dissolved into a disrespectful shove.
Having visited Kedarnath, Badrinath and Sabarimala, Arjun and Sarika Singh, 51 and 42 years old respectively, qualify as serial pilgrims. Even they found devotion buried under dust and disorder. “The pittuwale (porters who carry pilgrims on their backs) quote their own prices. There’s no fixed rate — just a syndicate that charges as high as people will pay,” Arjun says. When their descent ended after a day’s climb, darkness and silence awaited them, “no lights, no benches, no transport”. “We had to keep walking until we found a ride. At our age, that exhaustion breaks you,” says Arjun.
Sanjukta Banerjee. PIC/NITIN JADHAV (right) Sarika and Arjun Singh
Despite the nearly Rs 1000 crore spent annually on temple and yatra management, most sites remain unprepared where there is no crowd control, no sanitation, no plan for safety or return. Sarika chimes in saying, “Public washrooms are a mess, but so is the public. The lack of education shows. I just prepare myself not to use them at all.” Yet, when she finally saw the deity, “it felt like reaching heaven”. Sarika’s voice is a reminder of the fragile balance between worship and endurance.
Across India’s sacred circuits, touts and agents sell “VIP darshan” or “exclusive abhishek” packages, promising crowd-free access to the divine. Often, these turn out to be elaborate scams. In temple towns like Tirupati and Haridwar, police record dozens of FIRs each year against agents duping devotees with fake passes.
Panda recalls seeing this divide starkly at the Kumbh Mela. “VIPs were taken on chariots while we common pilgrims were stranded for hours. Even during the stampede, the routes the VIPs were passing by stayed closed for us,” she says. “I am never going there ever again. It breaks your heart but to keep your faith alive, you need to be alive as well,” she says. Arjun, who has done multiple yatras, calls it “an unholy economy”.
A content manager and travel blogger, Amruta Tavhare loves pilgrimages but recalls how routes are often plagued with horses pushing you
“There’s no uniform system. Prices for porters, horses, darshans — everything fluctuates. People will pay anything for a glimpse of God,” he adds. Sarika believes the desperation stems from faith itself. “You wait for 10 hours, get cheated, get pushed around and yet, one sight of the deity and you forget it all.” Between sanctity and scam, India’s pilgrims keep walking, wallets lighter and faith somehow intact.
For Amruta Tavhare, a content manager and travel blogger, the road to Kedarnath was both breathtaking and bruising. She recalls the ascent lined with restless horses, their hooves clattering against stone. “The path is so narrow that horses come from both directions. They won’t wait — they’ll push past you,” she says. Her husband’s foot was trampled by one. Riders have little control, she adds, because “the owners walk far behind, shouting commands no one can hear”.
At least nine people were killed in Andhra Pradesh’s temple stampede on November 1. PIC/PTI
The congestion, inflated costs — Rs 100 for a bottle of water — and the endless queues might have broken a lesser pilgrim’s spirit. Yet, Tavhare remembers something else too. “Every step felt like a test,” she says, “but once I saw the temple lights, it was as if the pain vanished.”
Despite the chaos, she insists she’d return. Perhaps that is the mystique of faith — its power to turn peril into peace, exhaustion into a transcendence. Every pilgrim’s story carries the same refrain of danger, and devotion. As yatras swell in number and intensity, faith and one’s belief system alone cannot bear the weight. For a country where religion runs deeper than rivers, it’s time for infrastructure and planning to rise in equal measure.
The agencies of faith
Travel operators like Nishant Badami, who curates spiritual experiences for modern yatris, say their mission is to bring order and comfort to an often chaotic system. “We ensure clean rest stops, reliable sanitation, warmth and shelter when required,” she explains. “The idea is to make the journey meaningful, not distressing.”
Badami calls it “comfort layered into a difficult journey” — personal attention that large operators don’t offer. Her company Ubuntu adjusts the pace of travel, and customises rest and meditation stops. Beyond convenience, she stresses conscious travel ethics like fair pay for pony owners and porters, responsible waste management, and respect for fragile ecosystems.
Ravindra Wankhedkar
But faith-led tourism in India, she argues, still lacks institutional readiness. “We need well-engineered access routes. Wider walkways, non-slip surfaces, functional railings, proper drainage, and resting points every few hundred metres,” Badami says. Her wish-list extends to medical infrastructure, “not just a single base-camp tent but multiple oxygen points and trained first-aid personnel” and digital systems for safety and flow. “Timed entry slots, real-time footfall tracking, GPS-enabled emergency response, all of this India is capable of. The tech already exists.”
Ravindra Wankhedkar, a 64-year-old banker who started his own travel agency, echoes the same blend of devotion and pragmatism. “Pilgrims today no longer want to suffer for 10 hours for a second of darshan,” he says.
Through his company, Yogiraj Tours, Wankhedkar specialises in catering to elderly yatris on long routes like Badrinath, Kedarnath, and the Char Dham circuit. “I carry a kitchen with me,” he says with a laugh. “Home food matters more than you’d think.” But the journey itself, he admits, is riddled with logistical knots from surging crowds to what he calls “the loud discrimination” of VIP access. “If you stop the lines for every VIP for two or three hours, of course crowds build up and a stampede is waiting to happen. What happened at Kumbh and Andhra is no surprise.” He implies the importance of the management to take accountability in such circumstances and act upon it to avoid future similar incidents.
Then there’s the helicopter problem. “Last year, a return trip was Rs 12,000. This year it starts at Rs 20,000,” Wankhedkar says. “And even then, you can’t rely on booking online unless you have an agent ‘setting’.” His caution deepened after the Kedarnath helicopter crash in June, which killed six pilgrims and a pilot. “People think it’s a shortcut to your destination. But at those altitudes, nothing is guaranteed.”
Talks of a ropeway to Kedarnath, meant to ease congestion, remain just that — talks. Construction crawls, while demand grows. “Faith keeps the yatras alive,” Wankhedkar sighs. “But systems have to catch up before faith alone runs out of breath.”
Subscribe today by clicking the link and stay updated with the latest news!" Click here!
