Let’s help you
plan your journey
Explore responsibly, discover offbeat places, guided by locals, rooted in culture.
Let’s help you
plan your journey
Explore responsibly, discover offbeat places, guided by locals, rooted in culture.
Soumen Bhowmick
Soumen Bhowmick founded Pollen Dots in 2024 to plan journeys across India and Bhutan. He works in the Commercial Department of Indian Railways, where he has been since 2000. From 2016 to 2020 he was Head of Business Development and Partnerships at ScoutMyTrip, a community-driven road trip planning platform. There he built a nationwide network of local Scouts who helped travellers on the road, and grew the Road Trippers Club to 16 Indian cities. As a core member of Devil On Wheels, he helped travellers plan Himalayan trips and started Spreading Smiles. He has driven solo from Arunachal to Goa and from Himachal to Karnataka, and has run his own caravan for more than ten years. His photographs have won national and international salon awards, and his writing has appeared in Outlook Traveller.
Knowing how to prepare for travelling in India matters more than what goes in the bag, because the country changes under you as you cross it. India has no national language, twenty-two scheduled ones, and a fortnight on the road can cross three climates and a border that needs a permit. This covers the weather, the clothes, the language, the permits, the money and the booking.
India is not one country to prepare for. A fortnight can take you from a coast at sea level to a pass above 5,000 metres, through a state that needs a permit and into a district where the signal stops. A large number of places that share a passport is the honest description, and the preparation that matters is working out which of those you are actually crossing.
Start with the map and the month together, because the two decide almost everything else.
A single trip can cross three climates. Kerala in August is warm and wet. Ladakh in the same week is dry, bright and near freezing at night. Rajasthan in December is pleasant by day and genuinely cold before dawn.
The ranges are wider than people expect and the daily swing is what catches them out. A desert that reaches the mid thirties by afternoon can drop close to freezing before sunrise. A hill station that is warm in the sun is cold the moment you step into shade. Most of India is cold at some hour, including the parts nobody packs warm clothes for.
Then there is the monsoon, which is not one event. It arrives in Kerala first and works north over about six weeks. It is remarkable in the Western Ghats and in Meghalaya, and it is difficult almost everywhere else. In the high Himalaya it is the wrong question entirely, because what matters there is whether the road is open, and that runs roughly May to October.
So the useful first question is not when should I go to India. It is what is this particular route like in the month I can travel, and that has a different answer for every route.
Two things set what you wear, and they pull in the same direction more often than people assume.
The first is the climate. Loose cotton with long sleeves in dry heat, which is cooler than bare arms and not a compromise. Layers in the mountains, because the range between noon and dawn is large enough to need three of them. Something that dries overnight in the monsoon, because nothing else will. Closed shoes anywhere you will be walking on a village road.
The second is what is expected. Covered shoulders and legs are the safe default in villages and at religious places, and a scarf in a bag handles most of it without a change of clothes. The detail of that is its own subject and it is worth reading before a first trip.
The two forces meet more often than they conflict. Loose and covered is practical in dry heat and correct in a village, so the same clothes do both jobs. Clothing follows the terrain as much as it follows the custom, which is why what works in Jaisalmer is wrong in Munnar.
One thing that is not obvious. What local people are wearing is the most reliable guide available, and it updates itself. If everybody around you has covered up, so should you. If a place is relaxed, you will see that in the first ten minutes.
Less than you fear, and the geography of it is not what most people assume.
India has no national language. Hindi is an official language of the Union and so is English, and twenty-two languages sit in the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution. Hindi is a first language for under half the country and close to none of the south, so a traveller who prepared Hindi for Tamil Nadu has prepared for the wrong place.
English carries further than Hindi does in practice. It works in cities, in anything built for travellers, and with most people under forty in a town of any size. It thins out quickly in villages and on the road between them, which is exactly where you will want it.
What actually works is small and worth doing. Numbers, because prices and directions are mostly numbers. A greeting and a thank you in the local language, which changes the temperature of a conversation out of all proportion to the effort. And a translation app with the language pack downloaded before you lose signal, which is a different thing from having the app.
Where none of that is enough, somebody younger is usually nearby and will translate without being asked. That is the real system and it works almost everywhere.
The answer depends on your passport, not on your destination, and that is why most of what is written about this is wrong.
Three separate instruments are all called a permit. The Inner Line Permit comes from the Bengal Eastern Frontier Regulation of 1873 and applies to Indian passport holders. The other two are the Foreigners (Protected Areas) Order of 1958 and the Foreigners (Restricted Areas) Order of 1963. The word in both titles is the whole point. They regulate foreign nationals and they place no requirement on an Indian passport holder.
If you hold an Indian passport, the list is short.
Four states need an Inner Line Permit: Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram and Manipur. You need it to enter the state at all. Manipur was added on 11 December 2019 and is the most recent. It is applied for online in most cases and is tied to your dates and your route.
Lakshadweep needs an entry permit, which is a separate rule made by the island administration and applies to every non-islander, Indian passport holders included. The administration dropped the local sponsor and police clearance requirements in 2026, though the permit itself stays compulsory and wants your itinerary and every island you will touch, including transit ones.
That is the whole list. Ladakh is not on it. Spiti and Kinnaur are not on it. Rajasthan and Uttarakhand are not on it.
If you hold a foreign passport, the list is much longer and it changed recently.
A Protected Area or Restricted Area Permit covers all of Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Mizoram and Nagaland, and parts of Sikkim and Ladakh. It also covers places nobody expects. The Spiti sub-division and the Pooh block of Kinnaur. The inner line areas of Uttarakhand. Border zones in Rajasthan. And Lakshadweep, which needs a permit from everybody anyway.
The Protected Area regime was relaxed in Manipur, Mizoram and Nagaland in 2011 and reimposed on 17 December 2024, with immediate effect. A great deal of what is still online was written during those thirteen years.
Overseas Citizen of India cardholders are treated as foreign passport holders for all of this. That catches people out more than any other rule here, because an OCI holder travelling to see family reasonably assumes they travel as an Indian.
The consequences are no longer administrative. The Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025, came into force on 1 September 2025. It makes unauthorised entry into a restricted area punishable by up to five years, or a fine of up to five lakh rupees.
The process is also genuinely unclear in places, and EastMojo documented what that looks like in Mizoram in October 2026. The state's own tourism guidance says a permit must be held before arriving, and also says it can only be applied for after reaching India. Processing runs about a week.
Ladakh is the case that proves the distinction.
An Indian passport holder needs nothing for Ladakh. Not for Leh, and not for Nubra, Pangong or Tso Moriri. The Inner Line Permit was removed in 2021 and replaced by an environment and development fee, paid online through the Leh district administration's portal. It is a fee, not a permission, and nobody is deciding whether you may go.
A foreign national still needs a Protected Area Permit for Nubra, Pangong, Tso Moriri, Turtuk, Dha-Hanu, Batalik and Hanle. It cannot be applied for online or alone. It goes through a registered agent in Leh and the rules require a group of two or more.
The history is why the error is so common. The Leh requirement was abolished in 2014, reinstated in 2017, and removed again in 2021. Anything written between those dates is wrong now, and most of what ranks was written then.
One rule is still moving. Meghalaya proposed compulsory registration for all tourists in July 2026, described as a virtual inner line permit. It was being debated rather than enforced. Check that one before you travel rather than before you book.
Four to eight weeks is enough for most routes. Two things compress that and both are predictable.
The first is season. Ladakh in July, Spiti in August and the hill stations through May are all running at capacity, and the small places run out first because they have six rooms rather than sixty.
The second is festivals, and the effect is larger than the dates suggest. Rooms go before you would expect, transport prices move, and buses and trains fill in one direction while emptying in the other. What a festival does to a destination sets out the pattern and where to check the dates. This is not a reason to avoid them or to chase them. It is a reason to know which week you are booking into before you book it.
Where a route has a fixed point, book that first and let the rest arrange around it. A permit with a processing week, a ferry with a last sailing, a road that opens in May.
Yes on any route that leaves a highway, and the reason is not coverage alone.
Mobile data disappears for stretches in the hills, the forest and the desert, and it does so without warning. The more common problem is subtler. A downloaded map area covers the rectangle you chose, and a long route needs several, which is easy to discover at the point where you needed the third one.
Download the route rather than the destination, and overlap the areas. Then check that the app you chose keeps minor roads offline, because a village road that exists on a street map may not exist in an offline package built for driving between cities.
Carry one source that is not a phone. A fuel station attendant on a road you do not know is better than any of this, and the condition of the road ahead is almost always local knowledge rather than published information.
UPI works nearly everywhere there is signal, and that second clause carries the whole sentence.
A payment app needs a network. In the places where the network goes, so does the payment, and those are exactly the places where the nearest cash machine is a day away. Small homestays, village shops, local transport and permits at a checkpost are the usual cash points, and a permit fee in particular is not a card transaction.
Carry notes in small denominations and keep them separate from the rest. Changing a five hundred in a village shop in the morning is a real problem, not a theoretical one.
Foreign visitors should sort payment before travelling rather than at the airport. Cards are fine in cities and thin out quickly outside them, and the fallback is cash rather than a second card.
The published guidance is more conservative than almost any Indian mountain itinerary. This applies to Ladakh, Spiti, the Char Dham passes and north Sikkim, which is most of what India sells as a mountain trip.
The Wilderness Medical Society's clinical practice guidelines put the risk threshold at 2,500 metres and recommend gradual ascent as a strong recommendation. Above 3,000 metres, they suggest increasing sleeping elevation by no more than 500 metres a day, with a rest day every three to four days.
Now set that beside how people actually arrive. Leh sits at about 3,500 metres and the flight from Delhi takes ninety minutes. That is a gain of roughly 3,300 metres between breakfast and lunch, against a guideline of 500 in a day.
The guidelines do not say do not fly. They say that people who cannot ascend gradually should consider sleeping a night at an intermediate altitude. They also say medication is worth discussing with a doctor for anyone at moderate or high risk.
What this means in practice is that the first two days are part of the itinerary and not a waste of them. A trip that lands in Leh and drives to Pangong the next morning has built altitude gain into the plan without noticing.
One figure worth correcting while you are planning around it. Khardung La is 5,359 metres, not the 5,602 the signs and the Leh T-shirts claim, measured by GPS survey and matching three independent elevation datasets. It is still extremely high. It is not what you have been told it is, and the same is true of several passes marketed as the world's highest.
There is no Indian packing list, which is why this section is short and the detailed ones sit elsewhere.
What stays constant is small. Documents and their copies, a basic medical kit, a power bank, a torch, and something warm regardless of where you are going.
Everything else follows the altitude, the season and the surface. The Ladakh list and the Kerala list share almost nothing. A destination guide is the only honest form this takes, and we are publishing them one region at a time.
If you are driving your own car, there is a second list that has nothing to do with the suitcase. Tyres, spare, tools, papers and what the vehicle needs for the terrain are their own subject and get their own piece. How far to drive in a day is a question of hours rather than kilometres, which is the other thing a driver should settle before leaving.
When the cost of being wrong is the trip rather than an afternoon.
Most of this article is checkable by anybody willing to spend an evening on it. Three things are not. Whether a road is open this week, which is local knowledge and rarely published. What a day on a particular road actually takes, which no mapping tool knows, because it calculates for one car on a day when nothing happens. And whether the month your leave calendar gave you suits the place you have chosen.
That middle one is worth a number. A July 2026 drive from the Bengal border into the West Garo Hills took eight hours, and the Garo to Khasi crossing after it was a full day on continuous hill road.
The dates question is the one most worth asking, and the one an operator is least likely to volunteer, because the honest answer sometimes costs them the booking.
This is the part of Journey Architecture that does not show up on an itinerary. We hold the season, the route and where the nights fall as decisions to be made before anybody travels, rather than as things that emerge. If you want that done for a specific route, that is what we plan, and the Arunachal permit question alone is reason enough to ask early on a Northeast journey.
Colder than almost anybody packs for. A desert that reaches the mid thirties by afternoon can drop close to freezing before sunrise. A hill station that is warm in the sun is cold the moment you step into shade. Something warm belongs in the bag whatever the destination.
Loose cotton with long sleeves in dry heat, layers in the mountains, and something that dries overnight in the monsoon. Covered shoulders and legs are the safe default in villages and at religious places. The most reliable guide is what local people around you are wearing.
No, and Hindi will not help you in much of the south or the northeast. India has no national language and twenty-two sit in the Eighth Schedule. English carries further in practice, and numbers plus a greeting in the local language cover most situations.
Four states require an Inner Line Permit from Indian passport holders: Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland, Mizoram and Manipur. It is needed to enter the state at all. Spiti, Kinnaur, Ladakh, Rajasthan and Uttarakhand are not on that list, because their restrictions sit under the Foreigners orders and apply to foreign passport holders only.
Yes, and this is the most common mistake on this subject. An Overseas Citizen of India card counts as a foreign passport for permits, not as an Indian one. An OCI holder visiting family in Mizoram or Nagaland needs a Protected Area Permit like any other foreign national.
Yes. The Protected Area regime was relaxed in those three states in 2011 and reimposed on 17 December 2024 with immediate effect. Processing takes roughly a week, and unauthorised entry carries up to five years or five lakh rupees under the Immigration and Foreigners Act, 2025.
No, and not for Nubra or Pangong either. The Inner Line Permit was removed in 2021 and replaced by an environment and development fee paid online through the Leh district portal, which is a fee rather than a permission. Foreign passport holders still need a Protected Area Permit for those areas.
Yes, from every non-islander, Indian passport holders included. The administration dropped the local sponsor and police clearance requirements in 2026, but the permit itself is still compulsory and wants your full itinerary with every island named.
Published guidance suggests increasing sleeping elevation by no more than 500 metres a day above 3,000 metres, with a rest day every three to four days. Leh is about 3,500 metres and the flight from Delhi gains roughly 3,300 metres in ninety minutes. Treat the first two days as part of the trip rather than as lost time.
Khardung La is 5,359 metres, or 17,582 feet. The summit signs and most souvenirs claim 5,602 metres, which GPS survey and three independent elevation datasets do not support. It is still one of the highest motorable passes in the world.
Four to eight weeks suits most routes. Peak Himalayan season, festival weeks and anything in a small town need longer, often three to six months, because small properties run out of rooms before large ones do.
UPI works nearly everywhere there is mobile signal, which is the limitation worth planning around. In the hills, forests and deserts the signal goes and the payment goes with it. Carry cash in small denominations for homestays, village shops, local transport and permit fees.
Yes for any route that leaves a highway. Download the route rather than the destination, overlap the areas, and check that minor roads are included in the offline package. Road conditions ahead are usually local knowledge rather than published information.