AINEWS
The Department of Posts has begun a two state pilot, planning about 150 routes in Himachal Pradesh and Assam over the next 2–3 months.
A 12-kilometer stretch of mountain road between Mandi and Rehardhar used to mean a trip of more than two hours for the postman. On 12 June, a drone covered the same distance in seven minutes. That is the entire pitch, and the entire pilot, that India Post is now running in Himachal Pradesh and Assam.
Union Minister for Communications Jyotiraditya M. Scindia announced the launch on the Himachal route, the first officially operated drone postal service in the country. The route runs from Mandi Head Post Office to Rehardhar Branch Post Office, traversing roughly 12 km of mountain terrain where surface mail has historically taken more than two hours. The Department of Posts' PIB release on 13 June confirmed the launch and tied it to feedback from rural postal staff, the gramin dak sevaks and dak sahayaks, India's village-level postmen and postwomen who handle last-mile delivery in the country's hardest-to-reach post offices.
The Himachal flight is one half of a two-state experiment. Across the country in Assam, India Post has begun drone operations from the Hajo Sub-Post Office in the Guwahati division, with initial runs to Khetri Hardia (~7 km) and Dampur (~8 km) Branch Post Offices. Nine routes covering roughly 82 km have been identified from Hajo alone. Together, the two states make up the entirety of the pilot, not a nationwide postal transformation, despite the framing in some of the feature coverage.
The operator, on the available evidence, is Skye Air Mobility, identified by a single trade-press item and not yet confirmed by the Department of Posts in the PIB release or by either minister. That single-source identification is one of the softest pieces of the pilot's public scaffolding.
Geography is the reason any of this exists. Mandi–Rehardhar's road cuts through mountain terrain that slows surface mail, especially during the monsoon, when landslides and poor visibility can extend a 12 km surface run into something longer. Hajo's routes sit in lowland Assam, where flooding and river crossings can break the road link for days. A drone does not need the road to finish; it needs a clear air corridor, a ground crew at each end, and regulatory permission to fly. Civil Aviation Minister Ram Mohan Naidu Kinjarapu wrote on social media that the change represents going "from waiting weeks for a letter to delivering it through a drone," while Communications Minister Scindia said drones are transforming last-mile delivery "like never before." Both statements are promotional, from ministers with a stake in the announcement, and the "weeks" claim does not match the same-day surface service the PIB release describes for the Himachal route.
What the pilot does not yet establish is the harder case: cost per parcel, payload range, weather reliability, and the regulatory shape of a permanent beyond-visual-line-of-sight (BVLOS) postal network. BVLOS is the civil-aviation term for flights where a ground pilot cannot see the aircraft directly; India's drone rules allow it only with specific approvals, and the postal pilot will live or die by how that permission scales. The Department of Posts' own rollout target is to extend drone service to about 150 identified routes in Himachal Pradesh and Assam over the next 2–3 months. That is a stated intent, not a delivered outcome, and it is still a fraction of the routes India Post operates across the two states.
The test is whether small aircraft can substitute for roads that simply do not finish, and whether the postal department can fund, regulate, and scale them past a few named routes in two states before calling it a transformation.