Religious tourism and hospitality industry

Indian economy, for the sake of measurement, has been divided under three major headings – extractive, manufacturing and services. It is very disconcerting that agriculture, which accounts for about 60% of the labour force, is given the go by.

Oh, my bad ... it is in the primary, extractive sector. What are we extracting? The fertility of soil? Do not know. But, I am not going to worry about that as my focus here is on the third – service industry.

The segment of service industry that gets most of the column-inches in newspapers (and the corresponding space in websites) is Information and Communication Technology which also includes business travels of tech biggies.

The second prominent segment in services sector is the hospitality sector. This sector focuses on domestic and international tourists, on their R & R sojourn.

Here is my lament – there must be a separate category under services sector, religious tourism. I speak from personal experience, though more than 50 years old.

Every summer, my family (mother, father and younger brother and me) used to go on a weeklong or slightly longer “pilgrimage”. My father was big on planning and his robust planning got us through most these trips, mostly to various temples in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Karnataka, without much hassle.

A tourist spot was also thrown in for good measure – Jog Falls, the city of Mysore, Kanyakumari, where in, addition to the temple, we witnessed the sun rising and it setting at the distant horizon beyond the seascape in two opposite cardinal directions.

In Andhra Pradesh, it was limited to Tirupati, Tirumala, Tiruchanoor and Kalahasti. For the others, Kanchipuram, where we lived then, was a primary place of visit as a town of religious tourism. Similarly, Thiruvannamalai.

Look at January – Sabarimala is a religious-touristy place. Vaishno Devi in the north is a perennial attraction to religious tourists. Sagar Mela in West Bengal, Kamakhya Temple in Assam ... Shirdi must be one in some month(s) or the other. Rameswaram, Kashi, Prayag Raj ...Puri, yes. Gangotri, Yamunoti, Hardwar, Rishikesh, Badrinath, Kedarnath ...  

I am sure my father did a budgetary exercise, and I suspect it was better than what GoI did and still does! Temples beyond southern India could not be accommodated in our budget or within the available time frame.

Given the above, I am sure that religious tourism deserves its own chair at the budget/economics table, as a distinct item under “hospitality“. This is a stick to beat the atheists and anti-religionists, through economic returns on a spiritual investment.

Thus far I have not touched multiplier effect. This must go through the roof, given that at every step we need the pleading of the priest to god. And, the priest is not so easily available, and to approach him, yes, you guessed it, we need intermediaries.

In Sabarimalai, the last eighteen steps are the physical intermediaries and of course, we have multiples of that many spiritual intermediaries also! Nothing specific to Sabarimala. And all those religious trinkets? Add to the economic returns.

I have made my point. It is for the reader to figure out what it is!

Raghuram Ekambaram