Road Trip Essentials for Indian Highways: The 25-Item Car Checklist

Alongside the repair kit and chargers, pack PocketPip mini mosquito bat for cabin mosquitoes after dusk stops. It is an everyday home tool that also earns a place on a road trip.

The checklist at a glance

Documents and payments (6 items)

1. Driving licence. The original, or the digital copy in DigiLocker or mParivahan.

2. Registration certificate (RC). Digital copies are accepted. Download them for offline use before the trip.

3. Insurance policy. Check the expiry date now, not at a checkpost.

4. PUC certificate. Fines for an expired PUC are steep, and it takes ten minutes to renew at a fuel station.

5. FASTag with balance. Top it up the night before. A low-balance tag at a toll plaza means paying double in cash at many plazas.

6. Cash in small notes. Keep ₹2,000 to ₹3,000 in tens, fifties and hundreds. Small dhabas, tyre shops and parking attendants on state highways often cannot take UPI when the network drops.

Breakdown kit (8 items)

7. A checked spare tyre. A spare with no air is luggage. Check its pressure when you check the other four.

8. Jack and wheel spanner. They came with the car. Confirm they are still in the boot and that you know where the jack points are.

9. 12V tyre inflator. The single most useful accessory for Indian highways. It turns a slow puncture into a drive to the next town.

10. Tubeless puncture kit. With the inflator, this fixes most nail punctures in fifteen minutes.

11. Jumper cables. A dead battery after a night halt is common, and every passing driver can help if you have the cables.

12. Tow rope. Cheap, small, and the difference between a five-minute pull and a three-hour wait.

13. Torch. A proper one, not the phone. Your phone battery is for calls and maps.

14. Warning triangle. Place it well behind the car if you stop on the shoulder. Highway breakdowns are most dangerous because of the vehicles behind you.

Power and navigation (5 items)

15. Car charger with a USB-C port. One good dual-port charger runs the phone, the power bank and anything else that charges by USB-C.

16. Two cables. One always fails on a trip.

17. Power bank. For halts, hotels with one socket, and breakdowns with the engine off.

18. Phone mount. Navigation in your lap is how wrong turns and worse happen.

19. Offline maps. Download the route region in Google Maps. Ghats, forests and long stretches of Rajasthan and the North-East have no data.

Health and hygiene (3 items)

20. First-aid kit. Plasters, antiseptic, gauze, a crepe bandage. Check that nothing has expired.

21. Medicines and ORS. Personal prescriptions, something for motion sickness, paracetamol, an antacid, and ORS sachets for the heat.

22. Water, sanitiser and wet wipes. Two litres of water per person as a base, more in summer.

Comfort, and the small things lists forget (3 items)

23. Window sunshades. They cut heat for rear passengers and children, and mesh ones let you crack a window when parked.

24. PocketPip mini mosquito bat and skin repellent. Explained below, because it is the item people only miss once.

25. Garbage bags, an umbrella and a microfibre cloth. For the wrappers, the sudden shower and the fogged windscreen.

Why PocketPip belongs on a car checklist

Every road trip has the same moment. You stop for fuel or chai at dusk, the doors open for two minutes, and ten kilometres later something is buzzing near your ear at 90 km/h.

A mosquito in the cabin is an irritation for passengers and a real distraction for the driver. Swatting at the windscreen while driving is how people drift out of their lane. The car AC does not solve it. The mosquito sits in the footwell and waits.

Sprays and coils are the wrong tools for a sealed cabin, for reasons covered in our comparison of mosquito killers for cars. What works is a small bat the passenger can sweep through the cabin after each stop.

The PocketPip mini mosquito bat was made for this spot. It is 20 cm long and 96 grams, so it lives in the door pocket. It charges by USB-C from the car charger already on this list, and one charge lasts up to 7 days of usage. It is also the thing you will reach for in the hotel room that night.

Five checks before you start the engine

• Tyre pressure on all five tyres, including the spare.
• Engine oil, coolant and wiper fluid levels.
• All lights, including brake lights and indicators.
• Wiper blades, especially before monsoon and winter fog.
• Fuel above half a tank before any ghat or forest stretch.