The Economics of Religion

India is a crowded country - and that is nowhere more evident than in public places, even more in places like Tirupati, where the crush of people can be quite an experience. As India develops, aspirations grow and with that, the need to propitiate the gods on a regular basis. Apparently, there is a huge spike in pilgrimages immediately after examinations - with the growth of the knowledge society, it is increasingly becoming important to get a good education. And since access to good education is determined by exam performance, I suppose it stands to reason that people are willing to invoke any intervention, divine or other, that may be on offer. To top that, transport, accommodation etc are improving and becoming more affordable. The net effect is that there is a steady increase in the number of people making pilgrimages. That in turn, places a heavy burden on the infrastructure, not to speak of the deteriorating quality of experience for the individual pilgrims.
Which brings us to an interesting situation - is there anything that can be done to improve this? In a clear market situation, one would expect the supply to increase to cater to the increase in demand. But spirituality is clearly not an economic good - i.e. it does not seem possible for some other temple (or God) to step in and increase the supply! And since spiritual experience cannot (at least yet) have a monetary value, it is obviously not a candidate for the laws of conventional demand/supply. So what are the alternatives? Here are a couple - we are obviously treading on a very slippery slope - religion tends to bring out a lot of passion in lots of people:
1. Increase the temple user charges. In Tirupati, for example, there are various slabs you can pay to reduce your waiting time. In other words, the temple has tried to assign a monetary value to an individual's time and the individual's willingness/ability to stand in crowded lines in less than hospitable conditions. As purchasing power grows, the demand curve itself moves out - i.e. for the same price point, the demand is higher every year. One way to rein that in is to increase the user charges, a conventional market response. But this in turn, raises other tricky questions in an intensely religious country like India. Religion is treated like a public good - i.e. people tend to assume that everyone has an equal right to a spiritual one-on-one with their chosen God(s), which should normally make it difficult to increase rates. However, given the ability of Hindus to handle contradictions with ease and a deeply ingrained acceptance of elitism, this may come to pass sooner or later. In fact, the charges could even be dynamically determined based on the length of the queue - i.e. as the queue grows, the premium charges go up correspondingly, essentially capturing an increasing share of the consumer surplus.
2. Let the 'wisdom of crowds' make the decision. In other words, it is likely that some people will decide that all the pushing and jostling (not to mention frayed tempers) may not be a very spiritual experience and choose to stay away altogether - these are the people who would have decided that the total physical and mental cost of the pilgrimage may not be compensated by the spiritual upliftment. This is an interesting case of crowd-wisdom: if every pilgrim opts that line of thought, no one would actually go on the pilgrimage. The truth is somewhere in between - and it is not very clear what that equilibrium point would be and how that would be arrived at. Simplistically speaking, the break-even point would be where the cost of the total wait equals the spiritual returns - as the queue length increases, the cost of the total wait keeps on going up linearly and when it crosses the spiritual returns, the line should, logically speaking, terminate. The obvious problem with this is that there is no objective, standard measure of spiritual returns - it changes from one person to another.
3. As in any rational market mechanism, it may be that some other temple(s) may enter the 'market' to offer the same basket of spiritual benefits at a much lesser cost. This is not as inconceivable as it sounds, especially when it comes to religion where people are often willing to suspend rational thought processes - it takes a few myths to start drawing people from the larger places of worship to other alternatives. This may actually be the most plausible solution that may present itself and could even be positioned as cosmic intervention, making it the most politically correct alternative.

Remains to be seen what actually comes to pass - and the fundamental question remains, why is it that religion does not follow the conventional laws of economics?