Tourism Flows and Geopolitical Exposure
One visa restriction erased more visitors than India lost overall. The country’s first decline in foreign tourist arrivals since the pandemic recovery is less a story of demand and more a lesson in concentration risk, geopolitical exposure, and tourism resilience.
By Suman Tarafdar
India recorded 9.02 million Foreign Tourist Arrivals (FTAs) in 2025
A 9.4% decline from 9.95 million in 2024. These are provisional figures drawn from Bureau of Immigration records, published by the Ministry of Tourism in the Annual Tourism Snapshot 2025.
The contraction is the first since the post-pandemic recovery began in 2022. It does not reflect a shift in India’s appeal as a destination. It reflects the consequences of three concurrent structural pressures: bilateral visa restrictions, regional security disruptions, and source-market concentration that left the aggregate exposed, all occurring within a single accounting period.
The Bangladesh corridor: A single restriction that moved the aggregate
The aggregate FTA decline in 2025 is a single-corridor story. Arrivals from Bangladesh fell 73.37%, from 17,50,165 in 2024 to 4,66,012 in 2025, per the Annual Tourism Snapshot 2025. India imposed visa restrictions on Bangladeshi nationals after August 5, 2024, following the political transition in Dhaka. The net national FTA decline between 2024 and 2025 was 9,35,128. The Bangladesh decline alone was 12,84,153, exceeding the aggregate national contraction. Excluding Bangladesh, FTAs recorded positive growth of 4.25% in 2025.
Bangladesh ranked as India’s second largest source market in 2024, behind only the United States at 18,04,586, per the PIB Parliamentary Reply USQ 1412, Rajya Sabha, 11 December 2025. By 2025, it had fallen to fifth place. In 2023, South Asia accounted for 29.02% of all FTAs to India, per the India Tourism Data Compendium 2024. That regional concentration is precisely what makes a bilateral diplomatic closure this consequential. Long-haul markets absorbed no part of the volume loss. The United States remained the top source in 2025 with 1.81 million arrivals (20.1%), followed by the United Kingdom at 1.07 million (11.8%), Australia at 0.54 million (6.0%), and Canada at 0.53 million (5.9%), per the Annual Tourism Snapshot 2025.
The security layer: Pahalgam and its downstream effects
A terrorist attack at Baisaran Valley near Pahalgam, Jammu and Kashmir on April 22, 2025, was followed by Operation Sindoor in May 2025. International Tourist Arrivals (ITAs), which include both FTAs and NRI arrivals, stood at 2,00,85,644 in 2025 (provisional), a 2.4% decline from 2,05,68,622 in 2024, per the PIB Parliamentary Reply PRID 2240654, Lok Sabha, March 2026. The Ministry of Tourism does not maintain disaggregated state or corridor-level FTA data, as explicitly stated in PIB PRID 2220107. Precise national FTA attribution for Pahalgam therefore, cannot be established from government data alone, and no such claim is made here. The data establishes that a bilateral restriction and a regional security event coincided within a single annual accounting period, and the 2025 FTA figure absorbs both.
India’s Top Source Markets : 2024 Vs 2025
CountryRank 2024FTAs 2024 (Exact)Rank 2025FTAs 2025 (Million)USA11,804,58611.81Bangladesh21,750,16550.47UK31,022,58721.07Australia4518,20530.54Canada5476,27340.53Others (Combined)6---
The FTA contraction reflects the consequences of three concurrent structural pressures: bilateral visa restrictions, regional security disruptions, and source-market concentration that left the aggregate exposed.
Foreign exchange earnings: The per-visitor quality signal
Foreign Exchange Earnings (FEE) from tourism do not track the FTA decline proportionally. FEE rose from ₹1,69,917 crore (USD 21.360 billion) in 2022 to ₹2,66,045 crore (USD 32.189 billion) in 2023, and further to a revised ₹2,93,033 crore (USD 35.016 billion) in 2024—a growth of 8.78 %, before contracting to ₹2,73,638 crore (USD 31.33 billion, provisional) in 2025, per the India Tourism Data Compendium 2025 and the Annual Tourism Snapshot 2025. India’s FEE accounted for 2.02% of global tourism receipts in 2024, per the India Tourism Data Compendium 2025.
From 2022 to 2024, FEE grew 72.5% while FTAs grew 54.6%; earnings outpaced arrivals by nearly eighteen percentage points across that span. Per-visitor expenditure supports this divergence. The India Tourism Data Compendium 2024 records average tourist spending at ₹2.90 lakh per visitor in 2023, excluding transport. Tourism’s contribution to India’s GDP stood at 5.00% (direct and indirect) in 2022-23, and the sector supported 76.17 million direct and indirect jobs in that year, per the same Compendium. The FEE contraction of ₹19,395 crore in 2025 relative to the revised 2024 figure is a fiscal signal, not a tourism statistic alone.
Facilitation architecture: Where policy has moved and where it has not
India has extended e-visa access to nationals of 167 countries across nine sub-categories, with entry through 31 designated airports and six seaports as of December 2024, per the Ministry of Tourism Annual Report 2024-25. 31.74 lakh e-visas were issued between November 2024 and November 2025, per the PIB USQ 1412, Rajya Sabha, 11 December 2025. Mode-wise data for 2024 confirms that air travel accounted for 83.41% of foreign arrivals, with land routes at 16.05% and waterways at 0.55%, per the India Tourism Data Compendium 2025.
On the aviation infrastructure side, international air passenger traffic grew 10.6% to 73.87 million in FY 2024-25, per the DGCA Handbook of Statistics 2024-25 and Ministry of Civil Aviation Parliamentary Reply, Lok Sabha, Annexure I. Gateway infrastructure expanded even as inbound tourist volumes contracted. Air arrivals remain spatially concentrated. Delhi and Mumbai jointly handled 57.2% of all air-mode FTAs in 2023, and December alone recorded 1.10 million arrivals: 11.5% of the annual total per the India Tourism Data Compendium 2024. Gateway concentration and peak-season congestion are structural constraints that visa facilitation and airport expansion at the national level do not directly resolve.
The exposure structure
Three layers define India’s inbound tourism vulnerability. The neighbourhood layer: South Asian arrivals are diplomatically reversible at the speed of a bilateral notification, as the Bangladesh corridor demonstrated in 2025. The security layer: regional conflict events suppress bookings rapidly, with effects on arrivals extending beyond the immediate response window. The macroeconomic layer: FEE has partially decoupled from FTA growth, supported by a shift toward higher per-visitor spending, but this position is not secured by durable source-market diversification.
In 2023, the top 10 source markets accounted for 70.06% of all FTAs, as per the India Tourism Data Compendium 2024. The top five in 2024: the United States, Bangladesh, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Canada accounted for 55.73 lakh arrivals, per PIB USQ 1412. The concentration is not just geographic. It is diplomatic.
The Ministry of Tourism’s pre-2025 projection of 20 million International Tourist Arrivals, cited in the India Tourism Data Compendium Key Highlights 2024, was not met. ITA in 2025 stood at 2,00,85,644 (provisional), per PIB PRID 2240654. India’s FTA figure of 9.02 million in 2025 sits 17.5% below its own 2019 peak of 10.93 million. The data does not question India’s position as a destination. It asks whether the source market and security architecture are resilient enough to absorb the next corridor-level disruption in 2026, given that 2025 shows they could not adequately absorb this one.
Data note: The most recent data available at the time of writing is the Ministry of Tourism Monthly Tourism Snapshot for January 2026, which recorded 10.07 lakh FTAs and Foreign Exchange Earnings of ₹31,200 crore (USD 3.44 billion) for January 2026. February–March 2026 data and Q1 2026 provisional figures were not available at the time of writing.
