Pilgrim travel has been a major source of growth in intercity bus travel, Prakash Sangam, chief executive at redBus said in an interview with The Hindu. Pilgrims thronging the Kumbh Mela were the most high-profile example, with a thirty-six-fold increase in demand for buses terminating in Ayodhya, Prayagraj and Varanasi. “We have never seen anything like this before,” Mr. Sangam said. “Demand was coming from all over the country.” There was even a bus route running from Coimbatore to Prayagraj, a route longer than 2,000km.
The surge in bus demand comes as rail and air routes remain at capacity, something that can occasionally be a bigger problem for pilgrim sites. Bus travel firms can see demand for these routes simply because users search for them. “So we started looking at this data and went to our bus operators saying, look, we are seeing this kind of demand build up.”
Pilgrim travel is shaping up to be a major portion of bus travel — according to data shared with The Hindu, 7% of redBus’s trips throughout the year are booked by pilgrims. The top destinations include Varanasi, Tirupati, Puri, Dwarka and Shirdi. In 2024, Tiruchendur saw the highest year-over-year growth of 62%. New pilgrim destinations like Gaya and Kainchi Dham have seen a doubling of bus capacity. Road projects like the Char Dham have also opened up many temples to buses.
Bus operators have been able to serve increased demand in ways that the railways and airlines haven’t. “The good part about the bus and cab operators is that the inventory can easily flex when flights or trains are constricted by the number of landing slots or track availability,” Mr. Sangam said.
Uttar Pradesh’s State-owned intercity bus transport company was facilitating travel to Kumbh destinations in full swing, and other States’ regional transport corporations were opening up capacity too. But “the sheer volumes of buses that private operators were able to mobilize, was a lot more,” Mr. Sangam said. Shorter routes like Bangalore to Tirupati are benefiting from EV buses, which Mr. Sangam said currently constituted around 1% of private fleets.
Published – April 05, 2025 08:21 pm IST
