This article is co-authored by Adrian Ellis, founder / director of AEA Consulting and the Global Cultural Districts Network, and Dr. Shwetal Patel, visual arts and culture strategist.
India possesses tangible cultural assets and intangible heritage that most nations would consider transformational for economic development. The country attracts more than 400 million domestic pilgrims annually. It hosts 42 UNESCO World Heritage Sites. The spiritual tourism economy alone generates an estimated ₹3 lakh crore in economic activity. Religious tourism in India has surged in recent years, yet in 2023, Thailand welcomed 35 million international tourists while India received just 9.66 million, a 3.6-fold gap despite India’s far greater cultural endowment. The contrast is not primarily one of assets. It is one of institutional capacity.
Yet the economic return captured from this activity remains a fraction of its potential. The revenue model for most cultural and pilgrimage destinations has not fundamentally changed in centuries: temple donations, informal street vendors, unregulated accommodation, and transport operating outside formal economic structures. Visitor spend concentrates in narrow corridors during festival periods. Employment remains seasonal and precarious. Local governments struggle to recover the cost of maintaining infrastructure. Private sector investment in destination development is sporadic and often disconnected from the cultural assets that draw visitors in the first place.
The Maha Kumbh Mela 2025 offers the starkest available illustration. The gathering generated estimated tourism revenue exceeding ₹1.5 lakh crore and created over 600,000 jobs. The infrastructure including roads, bridges, sanitation, pontoon crossings, was world-class. Yet the economic benefits were uneven: larger hotels and organised vendors captured the bulk of tourist spending, while informal workers, vendors, boatmen, rickshaw drivers faced narrower margins due to middlemen and petty corruption. The world’s largest religious gathering demonstrated both the extraordinary scale of India’s cultural tourism potential and the structural failure to route economic value toward communities and cultural practitioners. Infrastructure without institutional architecture does not close that gap.
The Indian government recognises the paradox. Over the past decade, substantial capital has been deployed through SWADESH Darshan, PRASAD, HRIDAY, and Smart Cities Mission programmes to develop cultural tourism infrastructure. The Kashi Vishwanath Corridor in Varanasi invested more than ₹800 crore in creating a processional approach to one of Hinduism’s most sacred sites. Similar corridor projects are underway in Ayodhya, Ujjain, and Mathura.
The ambition has since grown considerably. The Union Budget 2025–26 allocated ₹2,541 crore to tourism, nearly three times the previous year’s ₹850 crore with a major initiative to develop 50 top tourist destinations in partnership with states through a competitive challenge mode, requiring states to submit development plans and provide land for critical infrastructure including hotels. Prime Minister Modi called in July 2024 for transforming Indian tourism into a trillion-dollar sector by 2047, a target reinforced by NITI Aayog’s India Tourism Vision 2047, which outlines a roadmap to increase tourism’s contribution to GDP from the current 5 percent to 10 percent. The industry federation FAITH has set its own marker: a $3 trillion tourism economy by 2047, targeting 100 million international tourists and 200 million jobs.
The most dramatic recent commitment came in February 2026, when the Union Cabinet approved the conversion of the historic North and South Blocks into the Yuge Yugeen Bharat National Museum. The museum will span 1.55 lakh square metres across both buildings (larger than the Louvre) with eight thematic sections across 30 galleries depicting 5,000 years of Indian civilisation. A technical cooperation agreement was signed with France Museums Développement in December 2024. It is, in scale and ambition, the largest single cultural infrastructure commitment in Indian history.
What makes it also the most instructive example of the piece’s argument is this: as the minister confirmed in Parliament, the project’s budget and timeline are currently being determined, with the design phase still ongoing. Infrastructure is proceeding before institutional architecture exists. The question of who will operate this building and on what financial model, remains unresolved.
What is less clear, across all these investments, is the institutional architecture that will convert infrastructure into sustainable economic activity. A corridor is a physical asset. An interpretation centre is a building. Improved streetscaping enhances the visitor experience. But none of these interventions, on their own, addresses the structural questions that determine whether cultural tourism generates resilient, diversified revenue or simply redistributes informal economic activity into better-paved surroundings. Who governs the destination? What revenue model supports operating costs and reinvestment? How is visitor capacity managed to protect the asset while maximising economic benefit? What mechanisms ensure that economic gains reach local communities rather than leaking to external operators? These are questions of institutional design, and they are largely absent from the detailed project reports that define how capital is deployed.
The consequence is predictable. Infrastructure gets built. Visitor numbers may increase in the short term. But operating budgets become burdens on municipal finances. Maintenance standards degrade. Revenue capture remains informal. Economic benefits concentrate among a small number of actors. And within a few years, the question resurfaces: why is the economic return from cultural tourism still a fraction of its potential?
The answer lies in the distinction between infrastructure and institutions. Infrastructure creates the physical conditions for activity. Institutions create the organisational, financial, and governance frameworks that convert activity into sustainable economic outcomes. Cultural destinations that achieve long-term economic resilience do so because they have aligned four domains: capital structure, operating model, governance capacity, and civic positioning. Misalignment across these domains predicts institutional vulnerability regardless of how impressive the infrastructure appears.
Capital structure determines whether the initial investment creates ongoing financial obligations that exceed plausible revenue generation. A ₹500 crore corridor project may deliver a transformational visitor experience, but if it generates ₹15 crore in annual operating costs and the revenue model captures ₹8 crore, the gap becomes a permanent claim on public budgets. This is not a hypothetical. It is the operating reality of numerous cultural infrastructure projects globally, including in India. The question to ask during project design is not only “what will this cost to build?” but “what will it cost to operate at quality standards, and what revenue model supports that cost structure?”
Operating model design determines how the destination functions day to day: ticketing, visitor services, interpretation, events programming, seasonal capacity management, and stakeholder coordination. Most pilgrimage destinations in India have no formal operating entity. Responsibility is fragmented across temple trusts, municipal corporations, tourism departments, and informal vendors. When government invests in new infrastructure, the assumption is often that existing arrangements will somehow absorb the operating responsibility. They rarely do, because the incentives and capabilities do not align. An operating model suited to managing a high-volume cultural destination requires integrated decision-making, professional management, revenue authority, and accountability for both visitor experience and asset stewardship. Creating that capability is institutional work, not infrastructure work.
Governance capacity determines whether the entities responsible for the destination have the financial literacy, stakeholder management skills, and strategic perspective to make sound long-term decisions. Temple trusts may have deep religious authority but limited experience in tourism economics. Municipal corporations may have statutory responsibility but insufficient budget autonomy. State tourism departments may have policy oversight but no operational control. When accountability is unclear and capacity is thin, decisions default to short-term political visibility rather than long-term institutional sustainability. Governance architecture, the allocation of roles, responsibilities, resources, and decision rights, matters as much as physical architecture.
The government has recognised the need for private-sector partnership in heritage management through the Adopt a Heritage 2.0 programme, a joint initiative of the Ministry of Tourism, Ministry of Culture, and the Archaeological Survey of India. The programme creates naming opportunities and maintenance responsibilities for corporates and represents a step in the right direction. It does not, however, create the integrated operating entities, revenue models, or governance frameworks that the four-domain analysis requires. It is an amenity partnership, not institutional architecture.
Civic positioning determines whether the destination is understood as a shared asset that benefits the city and region, or as a contested space where different stakeholders compete for capture. Cultural destinations that succeed economically tend to have broad civic buy-in: residents see benefit, businesses see opportunity, government sees returns, and visitors encounter a coherent experience. Achieving this requires explicit attention to how economic value flows, how community voice is incorporated, and how the destination’s identity aligns with the city’s broader development trajectory. It is difficult to retrofit civic positioning after infrastructure is built and interests have calcified.
India is not the first context to confront this challenge. The pattern is familiar across cultural tourism destinations globally. Capital gets deployed to infrastructure. Institutions lag or do not materialise. Economic returns disappoint. The diagnosis is often that visitor numbers are insufficient, or that marketing needs strengthening, or that more infrastructure is required. The actual problem is structural misalignment.
The opportunity for India is to build cultural tourism destinations with institutional resilience from the outset. This requires shifting the sequence. Rather than designing infrastructure and hoping institutions emerge, the process should begin with institutional architecture: what governance model can sustain the destination over decades? What revenue model aligns with visitor behaviour and willingness to pay? What operating capability is required, and how will it be resourced? What capital structure supports long-term financial viability rather than creating permanent subsidy dependency? Once those questions have plausible answers, infrastructure design can be optimised to support the institutional model rather than define it.
The Smart Cities Mission explicitly encourages convergence between infrastructure programmes and cultural programming. The HRIDAY scheme recognises that heritage conservation and economic development are interdependent. The conditions for strategic intervention exist. What remains missing is the institutional layer that converts infrastructure into economic transformation.
The government has set a target of tourism contributing 10 percent of GDP by 2047, that’s doubling its current share. On current trajectories, infrastructure investment is accelerating while institutional capacity is not. India’s cultural tourism potential is not constrained by insufficient assets or inadequate visitor interest. It is constrained by the gap between infrastructure investment and institutional capability.
The question is not whether India will reach that target. It is whether, when it does, the economic gains will concentrate among intermediaries and large operators, as they did at Maha Kumbhor, flow to the communities, artisans, and cultural practitioners whose heritage is the underlying asset. Closing that gap requires treating institutional design with the same rigour, capital allocation, and expert engagement currently applied to physical infrastructure. The answer to India’s cultural tourism paradox is not more corridors. It is the capacity to make them work.