The present study aims to investigate the impact of tourism growth on human development in Indian economy. For this purpose, the study uses annual data from 1980 to 2018 and utilizes two proxies for tourism growth – tourism receipt and tourist arrivals – and uses human development index calculated by UNDP. The study uses control variables such as government expenditure and trade openness. The study employs auto regressive distributed lag (ARDL) approach to investigate the cointegrating relationship among the variables in the model. Further, the study also explores the causal nexus between tourism sector and human development by using the Toda-Yamamoto Granger non-causality test. The result of ARDL bounds test reveals the existence of cointegrating relationship between human development indicators, government expenditure, trade openness, and tourism sector growth. The cointegating coefficient confirms a positive and significant relationship between tourism sector growth and human development in India. The causality result suggests that economic growth and tourism have a positive impact while trade openness has a negative impact on human development in India. The major findings of this study suggest that tourism plays an important role in the socio-economic development of Indian economy in recent years and the country must develop this sector to achieve sustainable development.