Who comes to Punjab

Punjab's visitor economy is concentrated almost entirely on Amritsar: the Golden Temple, Jallianwala Bagh, the Partition Museum and the Attari border ceremony, within a few kilometres of each other.

The Golden Temple receives visitor numbers comparable to the largest religious sites in the world and it charges nothing, feeds everyone, and houses pilgrims free.

Anandpur Sahib with Virasat-e-Khalsa is the second centre. Chandigarh's Capitol Complex, Rock Garden and museums are a third.

Everything else in the state, the serais, the forts, the Anglo-Sikh battlefields, the Nakodar tombs, Sarai Amanat Khan, Kalanaur, Sanghol, the Kandi, the wetlands, receives effectively nobody.

The reason is not that these places are uninteresting. It is that nothing connects them, nothing interprets them, and nobody has written the routes down.

A state with this much in it and one visited square kilometre has a documentation problem before it has a tourism problem.

Almost all of Amritsar's visitors come for one day and one site. The rest of the city, and the whole belt of the Majha around it, sees very little of them.

There is no signage, no interpretation and no route linking the state's other sites, and most of them have nowhere to stay within reach.

What is missing is the ordinary thing: a marked route, a printed guide, and a person at the site who can answer a question.

What we don't know

  • Reliable visitor figures for anywhere in Punjab other than Amritsar.

Where to check this

  1. SGPC visitor estimates for the Golden Temple. Shiromani Gurdwara Parbandhak Committee ↗

Named but not linked. These are real, findable documents. This project has not consulted them for this page.

  • Punjab tourism department visitor data.

This page has not yet been read through by the editor. Treat it with more caution than the rest.

How this page was written. The text is compiled from the standard published histories and reference works, not from a document held in hand. Nobody from this project has visited the place or read the archive. The list above is where a reader can go to check it, not a record of what was consulted line by line. Dates and figures are the received account. If you hold something better, write in and it will be corrected.

This is one of 220 accounts in When the Water Went, the chapter of this site covering Punjab since 1947: land, water, debt and everything after.