Rajya Sabha data shows annual expenditure on Prime Minister’s foreign visits climbed from ₹36.12 crore in 2021 to ₹187.83 crore in 2025 — a 420% rise over four years — with the daily cost of travel also peaking that year at ₹4.47 crore
(AP News- New Delhi)
Expenditure on Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s foreign visits rose sharply between 2021 and 2025, according to visit-wise figures tabled in the Rajya Sabha on August 6, 2026. Annual spending went from ₹36.12 crore in 2021 to ₹187.83 crore in 2025 — a 5.2-fold increase, or a rise of 420 percent over four years — making 2025 the costliest year on record on every measure: total spend, days spent abroad, and average cost per day.
The rise in expenditure coincided with a significant expansion in the Prime Minister’s overseas engagements after the COVID-19 pandemic. While international travel was relatively limited in 2021, subsequent years saw an increasingly packed diplomatic calendar covering bilateral visits, multilateral summits and strategic meetings across Asia, Europe, North America, Africa and the Middle East.
Among the major engagements during the period were visits to the United States on multiple occasions, including meetings with Presidents Joe Biden and Donald Trump during their respective terms, participation in G7 and G20 Summits, the Quad Leaders’ Summits, BRICS Summits, SCO Summits, COP climate conferences, and bilateral visits to countries such as France, Russia, Japan, Italy, Germany, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Indonesia, Egypt, South Africa, Brazil and Greece.
The Prime Minister also travelled to Ukraine in 2024, marking India’s first-ever visit by a Prime Minister to that country.
2021–2025 figures are five complete calendar years; 2026 is partial (Jan–Jul) and excludes the undisclosed France leg cost, so it sits outside the 420% growth comparison.
More countries, but the per-country cost didn’t fall
The number of countries the Prime Minister visited rose nearly six-fold between 2021 and 2025 — from 4 to 23 — while the number of separate trips rose from 3 to 11, a 3.7-times increase. On its face, that scale could explain a rising total bill: more destinations naturally cost more in aggregate. But the cost per country visited did not fall in proportion to that expansion, the way bulk travel typically brings down a per-unit cost. It moved from ₹9.03 crore per country in 2021 to ₹5.58 crore in 2022, then climbed back up to ₹8.51 crore in 2023 and ₹8.17 crore in 2025 — landing almost exactly where it started. Average cost per trip rose outright, from ₹12.04 crore in 2021 to ₹17.08 crore in 2025. In other words, the five-year rise in the total bill is not simply a story of a government doing more diplomacy at a flat unit cost — each trip and each country visited also got costlier on average.
2025: more days, costlier days, and the single biggest trip on record
2025 combined every driver of expense at once. Days spent abroad rose to 42, the highest of the five years. The average cost per day, ₹4.47 crore, was also the highest — nearly 20 percent above the 2021–25 average of ₹3.74 crore per day. And the year contained both the single costliest individual visit leg (France, February 2025, ₹25.6 crore) and its longest unbroken multi-country tour: eight days across Ghana, Trinidad & Tobago, Argentina, Brazil and Namibia in July, costing ₹37.06 crore on its own — nearly one-fifth of the entire year’s travel bill in a single trip.
2023 was a smaller preview of the same pattern
The data shows 2025 was not an isolated spike. 2023’s average cost per trip (₹15.61 crore) and per-country cost (₹8.51 crore) were already both higher than 2021’s, even though 2023 involved fewer trips than 2022 or 2024. That points to specific high-cost visits — rather than visit frequency alone — as a recurring driver of annual totals, a pattern that repeats more sharply in 2025.
Nominal rupees, not inflation-adjusted
The ministry’s reply notes that its own comparative figures are “actual expenditure without adjusting for inflation or currency fluctuations.” The 420% rise is therefore a nominal increase. Even adjusted for inflation over the period, the scale of the rise — in both total spend and cost per day — remains substantial.
The published totals are still a floor, not a ceiling
At least seven 2025–26 visit legs, including the entire France component of the June 2026 trip, carry costs still pending final bill settlement or, in France’s case, not yet disclosed at all. The ₹557.51 crore combined 2021–26 total in the table above will rise once those figures are finalised.
