All Foreign Visits by PM Modi: Country-Wise Data

Foreign travel has been a consistent, high-visibility feature of Modi’s premiership since 2014. This article compiles the available data on how many countries he’s visited, how often, and what the costs involved have looked like.

The Overall Numbers

According to WION’s compiled tracking of his international travel, Modi has made 92 foreign visits across 78 different countries since taking office in 2014, a scale of international travel that, according to Business Standard’s earlier reporting on the same trend, made him the most travelled Indian Prime Minister on record, surpassing his predecessor Manmohan Singh’s own travel record.

The Most-Visited Destination

The United States stands out as Modi’s single most frequently visited country, according to WION’s data, reflecting the strategic priority Modi’s government has placed on the India-US relationship across trade, defence, and technology cooperation throughout his tenure, with visits spanning both bilateral trips and multilateral gatherings hosted in the US, including United Nations General Assembly sessions in New York.

The Diplomatic Forums Behind the Travel

A significant share of this travel connects to India’s participation in recurring multilateral summits rather than purely bilateral visits, including the G7, the G20 (whose 2023 India-hosted edition is covered in our separate article on that presidency), BRICS summits, and COP climate conferences, reflecting how much of a modern head of government’s foreign travel is now built around a fixed annual calendar of international gatherings rather than discretionary bilateral trips alone.

What the Travel Has Cost

Specific cost data has emerged through government responses to parliamentary questions. According to figures reported by WION, 38 of Modi’s foreign trips between May 2022 and December 2024 alone cost more than Rs 258 crore combined, with the single most expensive individual trip identified as his June 2023 visit to the United States, estimated at roughly Rs 22.9 crore. Separately, one conservative estimate cited in the same reporting put the cumulative cost of Modi’s US visits alone, since 2014, at around Rs 117.05 crore, though that specific figure excludes 2016 and 2017 visits due to non-disclosure of cost data for those particular trips.

The Domestic Debate Around Travel Costs and Value

This level of foreign travel, and its associated cost, has generated recurring domestic political debate, with critics periodically questioning the transparency of cost disclosures and the concrete diplomatic or economic return on such extensive travel, while supporters point to India’s substantially raised international profile and the specific outcomes of individual visits, including trade agreements, defence cooperation deals, and diaspora engagement events, as justifying the investment, a genuinely contested cost-benefit debate that recurs each time new travel-expenditure figures are disclosed through parliamentary questions.

Why Comparing Travel Volume Across PMs Is Tricky

It’s worth noting that comparing raw visit counts across different Prime Ministers’ tenures has real limits, since the international summit calendar itself has grown busier over recent decades, with more recurring multilateral forums now expecting head-of-government attendance than existed during earlier Indian premierships, meaning at least part of any modern PM’s higher travel volume compared to predecessors reflects a busier global diplomatic calendar generally, not solely a personal choice to travel more.

The Regional Breakdown

Beyond the United States, Modi’s travel has covered every major world region, with particularly frequent visits to neighbouring South Asian countries as part of the government’s stated “Neighbourhood First” foreign policy approach, alongside repeated visits to Gulf countries including the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, reflecting both energy-trade ties and the large Indian diaspora population working in the region. Europe and East Asia, including Japan, have also featured prominently, with Japan in particular hosting Modi multiple times as part of a deepening bilateral relationship that has included defence and infrastructure cooperation agreements. Africa and Latin America have received comparatively fewer visits across this period, a pattern that has drawn some domestic commentary about the relative weighting of India’s diplomatic attention across different world regions.

How the Aircraft and Security Arrangements Add to Costs

The disclosed travel costs cover more than airfare alone. According to reporting on the logistics behind prime ministerial foreign travel, costs typically include the operation of the Air India One aircraft used for VVIP travel, extensive security arrangements coordinated with host countries, advance logistics teams, and accommodation for the accompanying official delegation, which can run into dozens of officials for larger summit visits, all of which contribute to the per-trip cost figures disclosed in response to parliamentary questions, rather than those figures reflecting airfare and hotel costs alone as a simpler comparison might assume.

Bottom Line

Modi’s 92 foreign visits to 78 countries since 2014 represent the most extensive foreign travel record of any Indian Prime Minister, concentrated significantly around the United States and built substantially around a recurring calendar of multilateral summits, a travel record that has come with a disclosed cost running into hundreds of crores of rupees and a persistent, genuinely unresolved domestic debate over its transparency and return on investment.

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Abhyudaya Verma