Episode
India has more tourists than ever. So why is tourism in trouble?
- Podcast
- Daybreak
- Published
- Sep 9, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 935
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://share.transistor.fm/s/cf0874e2
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/daybreak-5886514/episodes/india-has-more-tourists-than-ever-so-why-is-tourism-in-trouble/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/daybreak-5886514/india-has-more-tourists-than-ever-so-why-is-tourism-in-trouble.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
India's foreign tourist arrivals slipped by about 8% from the year before to about 9 million in 2025, and a wave of recent reporting has finally made it a talking point. If you take out the business travellers and the diaspora visiting family, the number who came just to holiday in India may be closer to 3 million. And yet Indians have never travelled their own country more. Domestic trips have crossed 4 billion. The government is pouring thousands of crores into tourist circuits and temple towns like Varanasi and Ayodhya while spending almost nothing to bring foreigners in. In this episode, host Snigdha Sharma asks who Indian tourism is really being built for now, and what India loses if the foreign visitor drops off the itinerary. Tune in. Daybreak is produced from the newsroom of The Ken, India’s first subscriber-only business news platform. Subscribe for more exclusive, deeply-reported, and analytical business stories.