Under the leadership of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the government has placed religious and cultural tourism at the heart of its development agenda for the last 12 years. Channelling schemes like PRASHAD and Swadesh Darshan 2.0 into temple corridors and pilgrimage circuit from Ayodhya to Rameswaram, transforming sacred destinations while boosting local economies and employment nationwide.
When the Ministry of Tourism shared information in the Rajya Sabha on 5 February 2026 that it had cleared 53 projects worth Rs 2,208.31 crore under the revamped Swadesh Darshan 2.0 scheme, it was not an announcement. It was confirming a quiet but decisive recalibration of how India imagines, packages and sells its own heritage to the world. The figures are precise and verifiable: 53 sanctioned projects, an outlay of Rs 2,208.27 crore, of which Rs 187.32 crore has already been authorised for release. Spread across 15 thematic circuits, Buddhist, Coastal, Desert, Eco, Heritage, Himalayan, Krishna, North-East, Ramayana, Rural, Spiritual, Sufi, Tirthankar, Tribal and Wildlife, the programme is less a tourism subsidy than a national project of cultural cartography.
The original Swadesh Darshan programme was launched in 2014-15; it was an ambitious project across the globe. Between 2014-15 and 2018-19, it sanctioned 76 projects across 31 states and union territories for roughly Rs 5,290 crore, of which 75 have now been physically completed. The logic then stitches together far sites into themed corridors and hopes footfall follows the signage. The model worked unevenly. A 2023 performance audit by the Comptroller and Auditor General found uncomfortable gaps over Rs 4,000 crore sanctioned by 2016-17 without the requisite Cabinet approval, project delays stretching up to six years, an absence of annual impact surveys and Detailed Project Reports so thinly prepared that costing and sustainability planning often amounted to guesswork. The audit process also revealed that these projects met its original timeline.
Swadesh Darshan 2.0, revamped from 2022-23, is the corrective step of the government. Where the first version chased breadth, the sequel pursues depth. The new architecture abandons the circuit-first approach in favour of building individual destinations into self-contained, immersive experiences. A pilgrim arriving at Bodh Gaya or a traveller reaching the Borra Caves is now meant to encounter a finished destination rather than a waypoint on a map. The shift is captured in the scheme’s own framing as a generational shift rather than an incremental tweak, a move from volume tourism toward premium, experience-led value capture.
The portfolio is deliberately diversified, and the allocations tell their own geographic story. In Andhra Pradesh, Rs 97.52 crore has been earmarked for the Suryalanka Beach Experience and a further Rs 29.88 crore for the Borra Caves Experience in Araku. Bihar’s Buddhist Meditation Centre at Bodh Gaya is the symbolic anchor of the entire circuit, drawing Rs 165.44 crore, the single largest line in the new tranche. The Chhattisgarh Bhoramdeo Corridor was sanctioned at Rs 145.99 crore.
The spiritual and heritage heavyweights follow a familiar map of national reverence. Gujarat secured Rs 45.36 crore for Somnath and Rs 10.46 crore for Dwarka. Jammu and Kashmir received Rs 40.46 crore to upgrade facilities at the Hazratbal Shrine. Uttarakhand’s high-altitude shrines were reinforced with Rs 34.77 crore for Kedarnath and Rs 56.15 crore for Badrinath. And in Uttar Pradesh, the spiritual fulcrum of the Ganga belt is focused on Varanasi, which attracted Rs 18.73 crore for Phase I, Rs 44.60 crore for Phase II and an additional Rs 9.02 crore dedicated to river-cruise tourism along the Ganga, a project that converts the city’s sacred riverfront into a navigable tourism asset rather than merely a darshan destination.
What distinguishes these numbers from the earlier era is the willpower or the Prime Minister attached to them. Releases are phased and tied to milestones, a structural answer to the delays the CAG flagged for previous projects in the INC-led government. The allocation of the budget is matched by a modest initial disbursement, signalling that money now follows demonstrated progress rather than preceding it.
Swadesh Darshan 2.0 does not stand alone. It is one limb of a far greater national effort. Read alongside its sibling schemes, the original Swadesh Darshan and PRASHAD (the Pilgrimage Rejuvenation and Spiritual, Heritage Augmentation Drive), the combined sanctioned investment crosses Rs 9,225 crore across more than 183 projects. PRASHAD has contributed Rs 1,726.74 crore and delivered 54 projects; the first Swadesh Darshan added Rs 5,290 crore and 75 completed sites; SD 2.0 supplies the Rs 2,208 crore that completes the trinity. A 2021 IIM Rohtak evaluation of PRASHAD found measurable improvements in visitor satisfaction and the aesthetic quality of pilgrimage sites, lending empirical weight to a development philosophy that critics had once dismissed as cosmetic.
Branching off the main scheme are two further instruments that reveal the government’s appetite for granular intervention. The Challenge-Based Destination Development (CBDD) sub-scheme has sanctioned 36 projects worth Rs 648.11 crore. Some accounts place the figure as high as 38 projects worth roughly Rs 698 crore across four categories of spiritual tourism, culture and heritage, the Vibrant Village programme, and ecotourism linked to Amrit Dharohar sites. Within CBDD sits the Vibrant Villages thread, under which five projects worth Rs 24.90 crore target border settlements Kibitho in Arunachal Pradesh, Rakchham-Chhitkul in Himachal Pradesh, Grathang in Sikkim and Jadung in Uttarakhand. Here, tourism policy and frontier security strategy converge, developing homestays and adventure infrastructure in the remotest border hamlets, serving the dual purpose of livelihood creation and quiet civilian presence along contested edges.
A separate but complementary stream, the Special Assistance to States for Capital Investment (SASCI) scheme, has sanctioned 40 projects across 23 states for Rs 3,295.76 crore, offering interest-free 50-year loans to develop iconic destinations on a global scale. The PM-JUGA initiative will build 1,000 tribal homestays as a Swadesh Darshan sub-scheme, threading the tourism agenda directly into the socio-economic uplift of tribal communities.
The ideological spine of Swadesh Darshan 2.0 is unmistakable, and it is articulated in the government’s own vocabulary. The scheme is built around the mantra of Vocal for Local and the broader ambition of Aatmanirbhar Bharat: a self-reliant India that realises its full potential as a global tourism destination on its own cultural terms. The “Dekho Apna Desh” appeal, urging Indians to prefer domestic travel over foreign holidays, sits at the heart of this orientation. Where many nations import their tourism templates, manufactured spectacle, and generic luxury, India is choosing to monetise what it already uniquely possesses: a civilisational depth no competitor can replicate.
A Buddhist circuit anchored at Bodh Gaya, a Krishna circuit tracing the legends of Mathura and Dwarka, a Ramayana circuit mapping the footsteps of Lord Rama across the subcontinent. These are assets that cannot be reproduced in Dubai, Singapore or the Maldives. The strategy is to convert that incomparability into a competitive advantage.
This is also why the scheme’s 100 per cent central funding matters politically. By financing these circuits entirely from the Union exchequer while delegating execution to states, the Centre retains the narrative authority to frame India’s heritage as a unified national inheritance rather than a patchwork of regional attractions. The cultural geography being redrawn is in effect across India.
The most genuine departure from the past is the elevation of sustainability from rhetoric to requirement. SD 2.0 mandates environmental, socio-cultural and economic sustainability across every approved component. Renewable energy, eco-friendly materials, recycling and reuse, accessible infrastructure for differently-abled visitors, sanitation and safety are not optional add-ons but baseline conditions written into project guidelines. The Ministry has also released a National Strategy for Sustainable Tourism, aimed at mainstreaming resilience, inclusivity, carbon neutrality and efficient resource use across the entire sector.
Capacity-building initiatives target local youth, women and tribal communities, with the explicit goal of converting tourism into a livelihood multiplier rather than an extractive industry that enriches outside operators while bypassing the people who live beside the monuments. Tourism’s contribution to national employment of 15.34 per cent in 2019-20, supporting nearly 80 million jobs, gives a sense of the scale at which even marginal gains compound.
The CAG’s earlier findings during Congress ruled India are a standing reminder that sanctioned crores and completed kilometres are different things. Change in central power with Prime Minister Narendra Modi made the milestone-linked disbursement, broadened sanctioning committees and digitised monitoring through the dedicated Swadesh Darshan Portal are structural improvements designed precisely to close the execution gap that defined version 1.0. For now, the cartography of India is not waiting for the world to discover its cultural geography. It is redrawing the map itself, circuit by circuit and inviting the world to follow.
