K B Kachru President, Hotel Association of India (HAI) and Chairman – South Asia, Radisson Hotel Group

India is commanding global attention at a defining moment — as the nation prepares to host marquee international events and cements its position as a premier MICE destination, the world is watching how we scale to meet our tourism targets. The BRICS Summit alone will put considerable focus on room inventory and that spotlight is exposing a hard truth: our hospitality infrastructure has not kept pace with our tourism ambition.

Consider the scale of the gap. India currently has only about 200,000–220,000 branded hotel rooms — for a country of our size and aspiration, that is starkly inadequate. And this gap isn’t static — it’s widening, with demand for branded rooms projected to grow at 8–10% CAGR through FY28. This isn’t a metro-only story either. Tier-2 and tier-3 cities, driven by pilgrimage travel, leisure tourism, weddings, and infrastructure-led business demand, are emerging as equally urgent growth frontiers that need branded capacity just as much as our large cities do.

What makes this moment different is that the traditional bottleneck — capital — is no longer the constraint. HAI has long advocated for greater capital access to this sector, and we’re now seeing that play out on the ground: major hotel chains signed over 550 new hotels in 2025 alone, a record pace of management contracts. The numbers from HVS ANAROCK bear this out — 14,199 branded rooms were added across 176 properties in 2025, while a further 64,118 branded keys have been signed across 586 properties for future development. Capital has arrived. Investor confidence in India’s hospitality story is real and measurable.

What will determine whether this becomes capacity on the ground — especially with large global events on the horizon — is execution speed. Government support must pivot from enabling capital to enabling velocity: faster clearances, genuine single-window approvals, and rationalised state-level taxes and levies to cut timelines and costs. Three levers can accelerate this — Industry Status for priority-sector lending and fair utility tariffs; uniform Infrastructure Status across categories and city tiers, including tier-2/3, for long-tenure financing; and enhanced FSI to unlock more rooms on the same land in space-constrained metros. This is the difference between a pipeline on paper and rooms on the ground.

India has the market, the demand, and the investor appetite already in place. What we need now is a coordinated, government-backed push to convert that pipeline into rooms — faster, and at the scale our aspirations demand.