ZenCabs runs airport transfers and trips to Katra, the base town for the Vaishno Devi shrine, alongside city rides in Jammu. Pilgrim traffic is one of the three demand pools in my sizing of the Jammu cab market. Working with it made me look at religious travel as an economy of its own, and the public numbers are larger than most people expect.

The scale

The Ministry of Tourism recorded 2,509.63 million domestic tourist visits in 2023, up from 1,731.01 million in 2022 and about 120 crore in 2014. A large part of that is religious travel. In Uttar Pradesh alone, the state tourism department counted 10.99 crore visitors to Ayodhya and 4.61 crore to Varanasi in the first six months of 2024, out of 33 crore across the state. Ayodhya's full-year count rose from 16.44 crore in 2024 to 29.95 crore in 2025.

DestinationVisitorsYear
Ayodhya16.44 crore2024
Ayodhya29.95 crore2025
Varanasi4.61 croreJanuary to June 2024
Vaishno Devi94.8 lakh2024
Vaishno Devi95.22 lakh2023

Vaishno Devi is smaller than the Uttar Pradesh cities and steadier. The Shri Mata Vaishno Devi Shrine Board recorded 94.8 lakh pilgrims in 2024, 95.22 lakh in 2023 and 91.25 lakh in 2022, against an all-time high of 1.04 crore in 2012. That is an average of about 26,000 pilgrims a day, each of whom needs to get there, sleep somewhere and eat.

The economy around a shrine

The spend around a pilgrimage runs through transport, accommodation, food, offerings and guided services, and most of it goes to small local operators: taxi drivers, guest houses, dhabas and shops. Demand is heavy and predictable in aggregate, and it peaks sharply around festivals, when the Shrine Board prepares for Navratri crowds. The businesses serving it face a capacity problem at peak and idle assets between peaks, the same shape as the wedding calendar in my breakdown of the wedding economy.

Very little of this is organised. A pilgrim arriving in Jammu often finds transport through a taxi stand, a hotel desk or a number from a relative. That is a gap an organised operator can close with reliability and prices published in advance.

The risks, read as forces

Pilgrim traffic is exposed to forces nobody in the local economy controls, and my Push and Absorb framework is useful for sorting them. Reporting on the 2024 figures linked that year's dip to the Lok Sabha and Assembly elections and to the attack on a bus carrying pilgrims to Shiv Khori in June. Those are fast shocks, and a business with reserves can take the hit until numbers recover, as they did.

Rail is a different kind of force. Direct trains now run from New Delhi to Katra in about eight hours, which lets more pilgrims skip Jammu and a road transfer altogether. It is slow and permanent, the combination the framework flags as the most dangerous, because no single month feels like a crisis. For a Jammu transport business the right response is to adapt: follow the pilgrim to Katra itself, and build demand from the city and the airport that does not depend on the transfer.

What I would look for in a business serving pilgrims

  • Revenue by week across a full year, to see how deep the gaps between festivals are.
  • Capacity at peak, and what happens to customers the business cannot serve.
  • How much of the business depends on one route or one shrine.
  • Prices published in advance, which matter more to a first-time visitor than to a local.
  • Exposure to changes in how pilgrims arrive, such as new rail or road links.

Sources