Indians Are Travelling, But Not Every Journey Is A Holiday | The Week In Whys

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Key takeaways

Only 36 percent of Indian households reported taking an overnight trip last year.
Nearly eight in ten overnight journeys were for pilgrimage or medical reasons.
The monthly cost of commuting for urban women is nearly three times that of rural women.

Pilgrims, patients and working women are the real travellers, and the system hasn't quite caught up with them.

You may have seen those “Instagram vs. Reality” travel reels. On one side, we see a filmy Bali swing overlooking the valley. On the other, a long queue and a steep price to get that picture-perfect shot. The irony is that you usually find them on Instagram itself, the very place that sets the unrealistic expectations in the first place.

The reality of domestic travel

Speaking of the expectation-reality gap, I started wondering: are Indians really travelling as much as our Instagram feeds would have us believe? The answer is not a hundred per cent yes or a hundred per cent no.

When we say ‘travel', we picture holidays, leisure and recreation. If we are looking for yes in this definition, that figure is much lower than I expected. Did you know just about 36% of Indian households reported an overnight trip last year? Nearly eight in ten of those journeys were for pilgrimage or medical reasons. Leisure trips made up little more than one in five. And mostly, families in cities have more leisure trips than those in villages. In villages, only 13% of them took overnight trips compared to 36% in urban areas.

The next natural question is: what about the entire ecosystem we have created around the tourism industry? What about hotels, for instance? Well, that data is even more surprising. Indians aren't necessarily staying at hotels all the time. Many stay with friends and relatives, or in dharamshalas near temples. Also, accommodation accounts for just 12% of overall trip expenditure. That's because plenty of people don't pay for it at all.

The cost and gender gap of daily commutes

Now, let's move from holiday travel to something most of us do every working day: getting to work. Last week, I wrote about commuting. This week, I have another part — hopefully the final one — in the commuting series based on the recent statistical survey.

This time, I look at the cost of commuting, particularly through the gender-gap angle. The average monthly cost of commuting for women rises from Rs. 307 in rural areas to Rs. 884 in cities. That's nearly three times. For men, the increase is much smaller. Part of the explanation is that around 65% of rural working women walk to work, compared with roughly one-fourth of urban women.

Women leave home early and also tend to leave work earlier. Their workday doesn't end at the workplace. There are more strings attached: household chores, picking children up from school, and several other responsibilities. Then there's the question of safety, accessibility and reliability of transport. When people were displaced farther away from public transport in Delhi, female unemployment rose by 27%, compared with 5% for men.

Indians do travel, but rarely for the reasons our feeds suggest. Pilgrims, patients and working women are the real travellers, and the system hasn't quite caught up with them. The reality of travel is much more about purpose, cost and getting the basics right.

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