Why Everyone Seems to Be Going to Kainchi Dham

If it feels as though Kainchi Dham is suddenly everywhere, the numbers suggest that impression is not entirely wrong. The small spiritual centre in the Kumaon hills has been receiving visitors on a scale that would have seemed unlikely only a few years ago.

In 2024, around 24 lakh people visited Kainchi Dham, according to figures cited by the Nainital district administration. Officials said the annual number in earlier years had been closer to eight lakh. The increase did not stop there. Figures compiled using CCTV data recorded nearly 20 lakh visits between August 2025 and January 2026, while the district administration later reported 24.34 lakh visitors in the first six months of 2026.

Then came Hanuman Ansh. The film based on Neem Karoli Baba became one of the surprise successes of 2026 and brought his story to an even larger audience. Over the long weekend at the beginning of October, more than 35,000 people a day reportedly arrived at Kainchi Dham, overwhelming roads around Kainchi, Bhowali and Bhimtal.

It is tempting to call this the Hanuman Ansh effect. But Kainchi Dham’s rise began much earlier.

Kainchi Dham was already becoming a major pilgrimage

Kainchi Dham is an ashram and temple complex associated with Neem Karoli Baba, or Neeb Karori Baba, on the Nainital-Almora road. The Nainital district administration places it about 9 km from Bhowali and 17 km from Nainital.

It has been a place of pilgrimage for decades, but the scale of visitation has changed considerably. Even its annual June gathering shows that progression. Reports put attendance at roughly 70,000 to 80,000 in 2018 and 80,000 to one lakh in 2019. By 2023, around 1.5 lakh people were attending the annual event.

The larger change became impossible for the administration to ignore by 2024. Annual visitor numbers were reported at around 24 lakh, compared with roughly eight lakh in earlier years. By 2025, officials were discussing road widening, additional parking, shuttle services and even the possibility of a registration system and visitor limits during periods of exceptionally high demand.

This means the crowds seen after Hanuman Ansh are not the beginning of the Kainchi Dham story. They are the latest stage of a much longer increase.

The Steve Jobs story gave Kainchi Dham an unusual global audience

Neem Karoli Baba’s following had spread outside India decades earlier, particularly through people such as Ram Dass, the American spiritual teacher formerly known as Richard Alpert. But another connection eventually introduced Kainchi Dham to an audience that had little to do with conventional pilgrimage.

Steve Jobs travelled to India in the 1970s and visited Kainchi Dham after setting out in search of Neem Karoli Baba, who had died before Jobs arrived. The trip became part of the much-retold story of Jobs’ early life.

Kainchi Dham returned to international attention in 2015 when Mark Zuckerberg spoke publicly about his own journey to India. Zuckerberg said that during a difficult period in Facebook’s early years, Jobs had advised him to visit the temple in India that had been important to him.

The effect was noticeable even then. Temple management told The Times of India in 2015 that visitor interest increased following Zuckerberg’s comments.

That episode gave Kainchi Dham something relatively unusual for an Indian pilgrimage site. Its story began circulating not only among devotees and people interested in Indian spirituality, but also among people interested in Silicon Valley, entrepreneurship and the lives of technology founders.

Celebrity visits brought it back into Indian popular culture

Another highly visible moment came in November 2022, when Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma visited Kainchi Dham with their daughter. Their visit received extensive national media coverage.

It would be too simple to say that celebrity visits caused Kainchi Dham’s growth. Millions of people do not visit a religious site simply because a cricketer or actor has been photographed there. But these visits repeatedly introduced Neem Karoli Baba and Kainchi Dham to people who might not otherwise have encountered them.

The timing is interesting. The Kohli-Sharma visit came before the particularly large increase reported in 2024 and well before Hanuman Ansh. By then Kainchi Dham was increasingly visible outside its traditional circle of devotees.

The people arriving are surprisingly young

Perhaps the most revealing evidence comes not from celebrities or films but from the Uttarakhand Tourism Department.

A carrying-capacity study conducted in 2025 found that 67% of surveyed visitors were between 15 and 30 years old. Another 26% were between 30 and 45. Nearly 60% were visiting Kainchi Dham for the first time.

Those figures help explain why the current growth feels different from an ordinary increase at an established pilgrimage centre. Kainchi Dham is attracting a large population of people who did not previously visit it.

The same study found that 82.4% of visitors came from outside Uttarakhand and that 64% visited for darshan and returned the same day. Only 22% used local accommodation.

There is no reliable dataset telling us exactly how these younger visitors first heard about Kainchi Dham. It would therefore be difficult to quantify the influence of Instagram, YouTube, celebrity coverage or stories about Steve Jobs. But the age and first-time-visitor data show that the audience itself is changing.

Hanuman Ansh arrived when interest was already high

This is what makes the success of Hanuman Ansh particularly significant.

The film did not have to introduce an unknown spiritual figure or an unknown destination from scratch. It arrived after years of increasing attention around Neem Karoli Baba and at a time when Kainchi Dham was already receiving millions of visitors.

The film then became a major commercial success. By early October it had earned more than ₹400 crore worldwide, according to The Indian Express. Its success put Neem Karoli Baba in front of an audience far larger than the one actively searching for spiritual travel.

The latest crowds suggest that this attention is spilling into travel. During the long weekend beginning around October 2, Nainital District Magistrate Vandana Singh said the administration normally expected around 25,000 visitors a day at the shrine but saw more than 35,000 per day. The district administration attributed the rush to a combination of the long weekend, tourism returning after the monsoon and increased interest following the film.

That is an important distinction. Hanuman Ansh appears to have accelerated interest in Kainchi Dham, but the visitor boom clearly predates the film.

The bigger problem may now be the road outside

The changing scale of Kainchi Dham is particularly visible because of where it is located. This is not a pilgrimage city with a large road network surrounding a temple complex. Kainchi Dham sits in a narrow hill corridor on a route also used by residents and travellers heading towards other parts of Kumaon.

The 2025 carrying-capacity study found that parking was already the largest source of dissatisfaction among visitors, with 74% of respondents unhappy with the available facilities. Sanitation was another significant concern.

Authorities have responded with parking areas, shuttle services, traffic diversions and plans for road improvements. A bypass has also been under development to divert through-traffic that does not need to pass Kainchi Dham.

The October 2026 weekend showed why these changes matter. The congestion did not affect only people trying to reach the temple. Residents travelling to work, people moving supplies and vehicles heading towards other destinations were caught on the same roads.

This may become the defining issue for Kainchi Dham over the next few years. The question is no longer simply how to attract visitors, but how to accommodate them without overwhelming the place they have come to experience.

So why does everyone seem to be going?

There is no single moment that explains Kainchi Dham’s rise.

Neem Karoli Baba already had a devoted following in India and abroad. Ram Dass helped carry his teachings outside India. The stories surrounding Steve Jobs and later Mark Zuckerberg introduced Kainchi Dham to an entirely different international audience. Virat Kohli and Anushka Sharma’s visit returned it to mainstream Indian attention. Meanwhile, a younger generation began arriving in large numbers, many of them for the first time.

Hanuman Ansh has now added another layer. Its success has made Neem Karoli Baba part of a national popular-culture conversation at precisely the moment when Kainchi Dham was already struggling to accommodate its growing popularity.

That is probably why the current crowds feel sudden even though the rise itself was not.

Kainchi Dham did not become popular in 2026. What happened in 2026 is that a destination that had already grown remarkably quickly received yet another, much larger wave of attention.

The traffic jams are simply the most visible sign of that change.

Plan your visit: Kainchi Dham