Data story · Varanasi · 7 min read
Varanasi is booming. The numbers behind Dev Deepawali are harder to pin down.
Foreign visits to Varanasi grew from 2,566 in 2021 to 309,932 in 2024. The festival's own figures, from lamps to crowds, count different things.
121×
more foreign visits to Varanasi in 2024 than in 2021
309,932 vs 2,566
36×
more domestic visits in 2024 than in 2021
10.98 crore vs about 30.7 lakh
17 lakh to 25 lakh
Dev Deepawali lamps reported lit, 2023 to 2025
Each count covers a different area
Varanasi recorded 11 crore tourist visits in 2024, according to Uttar Pradesh Tourism Department figures reported by The Organiser. Of those, 109,787,811 were domestic and 309,932 foreign. The growth since 2021 is steep, but 2021 was a pandemic year, so the starting point is unusually low. For the festival itself, its date and how the night runs, see our Dev Deepawali 2026 guide.
Foreign visits, from a pandemic base
Foreign visits rose from 2,566 in 2021 to 309,932 in 2024, about 121 times as many. Curly Tales and The Organiser give the same series.
Foreign visits to Varanasi are 121× what they were in 2021
Foreign tourist visits to Varanasi, 2021 to 2024
- 2024
- Earlier years
View as table
| Year | Foreign visits |
|---|---|
| 2021 | 2,566 |
| 2022 | 83,741 |
| 2023 | 201,904 |
| 2024 | 309,932 |
Domestic visits, and a number that does not agree with itself
Domestic visits were about 30.7 lakh in 2021 and 10.98 crore in 2024. The 2023 total is where the reports part ways: one gives about 9.3 crore, which fits the 18.7 per cent growth it reports for 2024, and another gives 10.19 crore. We could not tell which is right, so we compare 2021 and 2024 only.
Spread across the year, 2024 works out to about 3 lakh visits a day on average. For scale, Kashi Vishwanath Dham recorded 6,36,975 devotees on 31 March 2024, which IANS reported as its busiest non-festival day. A visit count and a headcount are different things, so treat the two as a rough sense of size, not a ratio.
The lamps: three counts, three scopes
The lamp counts for the last three Dev Deepawali nights are all of the same order. They do not count the same thing.
The headline lamp counts do not measure the same thing
Lamps reported lit for Dev Deepawali, Varanasi (officials and press)
- 2025
- Earlier years
View as table
| Year | Lamps reported |
|---|---|
| 2023 | 2,100,000 (21 lakh) |
| 2024 | 1,700,000 (17 lakh) |
| 2025 | 2,500,000 (25 lakh) |
| Year | Reported | What the report counts |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 21 lakh | Lit in Kashi city, reported after the event by ANI. The state’s plan had been 12 lakh. |
| 2024 | More than 17 lakh | Across the whole city, 11 lakh of them on the 84 ghats, according to All India Radio. Another report adds about 4 lakh around the temple city, which makes 21 lakh. |
| 2025 | About 25 lakh | Along the ghats, according to PTI. One report says about 15 lakh were arranged by the tourism department and the rest by residents and committees. |
Read it as scale, not a trend. A rise from 17 to 25 lakh may be real, or it may be a change in what was counted. The counts are also announced by officials and repeated by the press, and we found no independent audit.
The crowd: estimates, not counts
We did not find an official count of how many people attend. What exists are estimates, and they come at different moments.
| Year | Figure | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 7 to 8 lakh devotees | Pre-event expectation in press reports |
| 2023 | 5 lakh tourists | An estimate cited in a police review before the event |
| 2023 | Over 12 lakh people on the ghats | ANI, describing the night itself |
| 2024 | About 10 lakh tourists | Official estimate before the event, with hotels, homestays and boats reported already booked |
Three of those four come from before the night. The only figure from the night itself is a description of a crowd, not a turnstile count.
The date moves
Dev Deepawali follows the lunar calendar, so the date shifts. Across the years we could confirm, it has fallen anywhere from 5 to 30 November, a spread of 25 days. For 2026 most sources give Tuesday 24 November.
The date moves by 25 days, so book the year, not the month
Day in November on which Dev Deepawali fell in Varanasi
- 2026 (expected)
- Past years
View as table
| Year | Date |
|---|---|
| 2020 | Monday, 30 November |
| 2022 | Monday, 7 November |
| 2023 | Monday, 27 November |
| 2024 | Friday, 15 November |
| 2025 | Wednesday, 5 November |
| 2026 | Tuesday, 24 November (expected) |
What the numbers can’t tell us
- Visits are not people. One traveller can be counted many times, and the department’s definition of a visit is not clear from press reports.
- We are reading copies. The visitor figures come from press reports of department data. We could not reach the department’s own tables.
- Lamp counts are announced, not audited. And each year’s count covers a different area.
- Nothing here measures spending, hotel occupancy or what the festival does to the city. We did not find reliable figures, so we have not guessed.
If you run a boat, a guesthouse or a shop on the ghats and can tell us what the night looks like from your side, tell us.
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