India’s Tourism Economy Requires Digital Public Infrastructure For Sustainable Growth
Digital infrastructure proposed to modernise India’s tourism economy.
India’s tourism sector is being urged to adopt a dedicated digital public infrastructure (DPI) to better understand and manage rapidly evolving travel demand, as experts argue that current systems provide only a partial view of visitor behaviour and market trends. The proposal highlights how existing data primarily reflects completed stays and visits, while offering limited insight into emerging demand patterns, traveller profiles, and evolving expectations.
The tourism industry’s scale underscores the need for improved data systems. According to official figures cited from the India Tourism Data Compendium 2025, the sector contributed ₹15.73 lakh crore to India’s GDP in 2023–24, accounting for 5.22% of the economy. It also supported nearly 36.9 million direct jobs and 47.72 million indirect jobs, together representing over 13% of total employment. International tourist arrivals reached 20.57 million in 2024, surpassing pre-pandemic levels and signalling a strong recovery trajectory.
Despite this growth, experts note that India lacks a real-time, unified understanding of tourism demand. Current datasets largely capture historical occupancy and visitation trends but fail to map forward-looking indicators such as rising interest in destinations, duration of planned stays, traveller demographics, or emerging travel preferences. This information gap, they argue, limits the sector’s ability to plan infrastructure, investment, and services effectively.
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The Union Budget 2026–27 has already proposed a National Destination Digital Knowledge Grid aimed at digitally documenting cultural, spiritual, and heritage sites to improve planning and destination visibility. However, stakeholders suggest that the next step should be a broader national tourism data grid capable of capturing anonymised, consent-based demand signals from bookings, mobility systems, payment platforms, and visitor flow patterns.
Such a system, proponents say, could help identify shifting tourism trends in real time, including the rise of solo travel, wellness tourism, remote work stays, and seasonal crowding at popular destinations. This intelligence could guide both private investment decisions—such as the type of accommodation suited for each market—and public planning in areas like transport, waste management, and environmental protection before pressure on infrastructure becomes critical.
The discussion also highlights regional challenges in states such as Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand, where tourism supports local economies but seasonal surges strain infrastructure and fragile ecosystems. A more data-driven approach, it is argued, could help distribute visitor flows more evenly, improve capacity planning, and create opportunities for smaller operators through open digital networks such as ONDC-linked tourism frameworks, ensuring broader participation in India’s growing travel economy.
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