Uttarakhand: Dev Bhoomi Se Karma Bhoomi | Tourism: The Ashram, The Ski Slope & The Wedding Temple

There is a particular kind of patience that mountains teach. For generations, the people of Uttarakhand walked it - up switchback trails to Kedarnath, along cliff-hugging roads to Karnaprayag, on foot for 21 kilometres to Hemkund Sahib. The state's identity as Dev Bhoomi, the Land of Gods, was never in question. What was always harder to answer was the second half of the sentence: could this also be a land of livelihoods? Could faith coexist with function — pilgrimage with productivity, temples with tunnels, orchards with export contracts?

Over the last five years, the answer has begun to take a physical shape. It runs through a 126-kilometre railway line cut into Himalayan rock, ropeway cables strung across gorges that pilgrims once crossed on foot, kiwi vines growing where apple orchards once stood alone, and a small Kumaon temple town that now hosts more weddings in a season than it used to host in five years. None of this erases the first identity. It builds a second one on top of it. That is the story this piece sets out to tell — not as a government bulletin, but as a piece of on-the-ground journalism about what has actually changed, what is still incomplete, and what comes next: Uttarakhand's journey from Dev Bhoomi to Karma Bhoomi, told pillar by pillar.

Tourism: The Ashram, the Ski Slope & the Wedding Temple

What it was

Uttarakhand's tourism identity, for a long time, ran on a narrow track. Spiritual tourism largely meant the Char Dham circuit and little beyond it. Winter was treated, almost by default, as an off-season — something to be endured by tourism businesses rather than marketed. And as a wedding destination, Uttarakhand simply wasn't in the national conversation; couples planning destination weddings looked to Udaipur, Goa or Bali, rarely to the Himalayas. Tourism in general was concentrated in a handful of familiar names — Mussoorie, Nainital, Rishikesh, Haridwar and the Char Dham shrines — while adventure tourism stayed mostly limited to rafting and trekking. To compound matters, 2021 itself was a recovery year: the state's tourism sector, like every other in the country, was still working through the aftershocks of the pandemic, with visitor numbers well below their potential.

What it is today

Three distinct stories capture how much has shifted — and, notably, they are shifting simultaneously rather than one at a time.

The first is Kainchi Dham, the ashram of Neem Karoli Baba, whose profile has been transformed by one of the more unusual tourism catalysts imaginable: Steve Jobs's own account of visiting in 1974 and the ashram's place in Silicon Valley's spiritual folklore. That connection has turned a relatively quiet Kumaon pilgrimage site into a year-round draw for both traditional pilgrims and a newer wave of global and tech-world visitors — a genuinely distinctive addition to the state's spiritual tourism identity, one no other Himalayan state can quite replicate.

The second is winter itself, which has stopped being a season to survive and started being a season to sell. The Auli Winter Carnival and the National Skiing Championship have given Uttarakhand a real, competitive sporting calendar in the months that used to sit empty. This is not a minor rebranding exercise — it converts what used to be dead time for hospitality businesses into an active tourism window.

The third, and perhaps the most striking, is Triyuginarayan — a temple in Rudraprayag believed, in Hindu mythology, to be the site of Shiva and Parvati's wedding. In 2022, the temple hosted roughly 50 weddings a year. Today, that number stands at around 300. That is not organic growth; it is what happens when a mythological association gets matched with active destination-wedding positioning and the infrastructure to support it.

These individual stories sit inside a larger number that tells the aggregate version of the same shift: Uttarakhand's annual tourist and pilgrim footfall crossed six crore for the first time in 2025 — the highest figure in the state's 25-year tourism history — with spiritual, winter and wedding tourism specifically named among the drivers behind that record.

The supporting infrastructure has kept pace with the ambition. Road, rail and air connectivity to key destinations — Dehradun, Rishikesh, Kedarnath and others — has expanded well beyond 2021 levels. Homestays, once a limited niche, have grown into a genuine tool for rural tourism and local employment, spreading the economic benefit of tourism beyond the traditional hubs. Government and private initiatives are actively pushing lesser-known destinations, along with adventure, wellness and eco-tourism, to reduce the sector's historic over-concentration in a handful of towns. Digital promotion, online booking and social media now carry a far larger share of tourism marketing than conventional channels did five years ago. And tourism employment, once clustered around traditional centres, is increasingly being positioned as a livelihood source for local communities and youth more broadly.

The shift, in essence, has been from a tourism sector defined by two peak pilgrimage windows to one built for year-round, diversified demand — pilgrimage, adventure, wellness, rural tourism, homestays and new destinations, all running alongside each other rather than in sequence.

What's next?

Having crossed the six-crore-footfall milestone once, the evident task ahead is turning that into a sustained annual baseline rather than a one-year record — which means continuing to build out the destinations, seasons and market segments (winter sport, wedding tourism, wellness, homestays) that made 2025's number possible in the first place so that spiritual tourism's traditional strength is matched by an equally strong secondary tourism economy around it.

What makes the tourism pillar distinct from the other three is how much of its growth has come from repositioning rather than new construction. Kainchi Dham needed the Steve Jobs connection to be told well and often. Triyuginarayan needed to be actively marketed as the mythological wedding site it already was. Auli needed a carnival and a national championship calendar built around the snow that was always there. That is a genuinely different growth model from ropeway steel or rail tunnels, and it suggests that Uttarakhand's tourism upside may still have real headroom left in sites and stories that haven't yet been found and told — a point worth keeping in mind as this campaign continues to look for the next Kainchi Dham or Triyuginarayan hiding in plain sight across the state's other 12 districts.

The Shape of the Whole Story

Connectivity, Agriculture and Tourism - three pillars, one stronger Uttarakhand

Put the three fully documented pillars side by side, and a pattern emerges that is easy to miss when each is read in isolation. Connectivity isn't just a roads story — it is the precondition for everything else. The ropeways and rail lines that will eventually turn a Kedarnath trek into a 36-minute ride are the same infrastructure category that lets a Kumaon farmer get dragon fruit to a Delhi market before it spoils and that lets a wedding party reach Triyuginarayan without a six-hour drive standing between the couple and the mythological site they chose.

Agriculture isn't just about kiwi vines and GI tags — it's proof that traditional hill livelihoods can be modernised without being erased, which is precisely the same balance the tourism pillar is trying to strike between Char Dham's ancient pull and Auli's new ski season. And tourism's six-crore-footfall record isn't a standalone achievement — it is what 45–54 lakh pilgrims, expanding road networks, and a state actively building out homestays and adventure circuits look like when you add them together.

This is also, honestly, a story with genuine gaps still open. The Rishikesh–Karnaprayag rail line is real and more than three-quarters complete, but it is not finished, and its December 2028 target means the "hours to minutes" transformation for that corridor is still a few years from being fully checkable rather than already achieved. Landslide vulnerability in the hills remains a serious, unresolved risk even as slope-protection work expands. Small landholdings, water availability, climate change and human-wildlife conflict continue to constrain hill agriculture regardless of how many GI tags the state adds. And the last-mile health and education story — arguably the pillar closest to ordinary residents' daily lives, as opposed to pilgrims' or tourists' — is the one with the least documented detail so far.

Where the Story is Headed

The actual experience of a state changing is more like what these three pillars show – largely aspirational – a credible account of what a five-year transformation should look like. The commitment to the Kedarnath ropeway's opening, the rail line's actual completion, and the "premium food basket" branding push as they happen. The story would continue with other important growth pillar articles in the subsequent issues to follow.

A ropeway that turns a nine-hour trek into 36 minutes matters first to the pilgrim making that journey and the hill village near its base. But it also matters to a national investor weighing where to put tourism or agri-processing capital, to a couple in Mumbai or Delhi deciding between Udaipur and Triyuginarayan for a wedding, and to a policymaker elsewhere in India looking at Uttarakhand's GI-tagging sprint — 18 tags in a single day — as a template worth studying.

Uttarakhand’s achievement in the last five years includes other pillars sitting alongside connectivity, agriculture, tourism and last-mile services that would be documented in the subsequent issues.

Uttarakhand was always Dev Bhoomi, and now it is transforming to a Karma Bhoomi, credibly and sustainably across eight pillars of change to be covered in the subsequent issues.

Issued in Public interest by Department of Information & Public Relations, Uttarakhand, Dehradun