“Can you get a drone shot of the campus?” is one of the most common requests we get, and the honest answer is always the same: probably, and I will tell you for certain once I have checked the coordinates.

That is not evasion. Indian drone airspace is mapped by location, not by city, and two sites four kilometres apart in Bhubaneswar can carry completely different requirements. Here is how the system actually works, so you can tell in advance whether the shot you want is straightforward, slow, or impossible.

This is a practical summary written for people commissioning aerial work, not legal advice. Rules change, and the authoritative source for any specific site is the DGCA’s own airspace map.

The zone decides everything

India’s airspace is divided into three zones, published on the DGCA’s DigiSky portal (digitalsky.dgca.gov.in). Every question about permission resolves to: which zone is this site in?

Green zone. The default for most of the country. No separate flight permission is required up to 400 feet above ground level. This covers the majority of ordinary commercial shoots — a factory, a campus, a construction site well away from an airport.

Yellow zone. Controlled airspace, typically surrounding airports and certain installations. Flying here requires clearance from the relevant air traffic authority. Achievable, but it takes time, and it is not a decision to leave until the week of the shoot.

Red zone. Prohibited. Flight requires central government approval, which in practice means the answer for a commercial video shoot is no.

The zones are drawn around infrastructure, not administrative boundaries. Airports, defence installations and certain government sites extend a controlled area around themselves. This is why the address matters and the city does not.

What has to be true about the drone

Registration and UIN. Drones must be registered on DigiSky and carry a Unique Identification Number. An unregistered drone flying commercially is not a grey area.

Weight class determines the rest. The categories that matter for video work:

Nano — up to 250g. The lightest regulatory burden, and also the least capable in wind, which matters more in coastal Odisha than people expect.
Micro — 250g to 2kg. Requires a Remote Pilot Certificate. Most compact cinema drones sit here.
Small — 2kg to 25kg. Full registration and UIN, and a Remote Pilot Licence. The heavier cinema rigs live in this class.

What has to be true about the pilot

Commercial operation requires the pilot to hold the appropriate DGCA Remote Pilot Certificate for the drone’s weight class. Certification is obtained through a DGCA-approved Remote Pilot Training Organisation — there are over 240 approved RPTOs across India — and typically requires the pilot to be at least 18, to have passed Class 10, and to hold a Class 2 medical certificate. Basic certification training usually runs five to six days.

The practical point for a client: ask. A studio operating legally will produce certification without hesitation. It is a reasonable thing to ask for, and the consequences of it not existing land on the site owner as well as the operator.

The operating rules that shape what you can film

400 feet AGL is the ceiling in green zones. Higher requires specific permission.

Visual line of sight. The pilot must be able to see the drone with their own eyes throughout the flight, unless a Beyond Visual Line of Sight waiver has been granted. This is the rule that most often changes a shot: flying a drone away down the length of a long factory or along a beach until it is a dot is not permitted without a waiver, so the composition has to be planned around a flight path that stays visible.

Night flying requires a DGCA waiver. This one catches people out repeatedly, because the most requested aerial shots — a lit campus at dusk, an illuminated building during an evening function — are exactly the ones that need it. If the shot you want is after dark, it has to be raised early, not on the day.

Everything goes through DigiSky. Registration, pilot licensing and flight permissions are all handled on the same portal, which at least means there is one authoritative place to check rather than several.

What this means in practice for a shoot in Bhubaneswar

Give the exact location, not the city. A pin, or a full address. “Bhubaneswar” cannot be checked; a specific campus can.

Raise it at brief stage, not shoot stage. Green zone sites need no separate permission and can be shot as soon as the crew is booked. Yellow zone sites need clearance with lead time. Finding out which one you have on the morning of the shoot is the expensive version.

Get the site owner’s permission separately. Airspace clearance and permission to film over private property are different things. A campus, a plant or a construction site will usually want its own written approval, and often wants to control which parts appear on camera.

Have a ground plan. Even in a green zone, flying over crowds, close to buildings or near power lines carries its own operational constraints. For events, this usually means flying before the audience arrives or from a position away from them.

The shots worth having, and the ones that are not

Aerial footage is expensive per second, and the temptation is to use it as decoration. The shots that actually earn their cost are the ones that show something no other camera can:

Scale. A plant, a campus or a site simply does not read from the ground. If the point you are making is how big this is, the drone is the only camera that makes it.

Context. Where a building sits, what surrounds it, how a site relates to a road or a coastline. Useful for institutional and infrastructure work in a way it never is for interviews.

Progress. Construction and infrastructure documented from the same aerial position over months is genuinely valuable, and the repeatability matters more than the cinematography.

What does not earn its cost is a slow rise over a building at the start of a corporate film because corporate films start that way. It looks like every other corporate film, it eats budget that could have bought a second shoot day, and nobody remembers it.

The short version

Check the zone for the exact coordinates on DigiSky before anything else.
Drone registered with a UIN; pilot holds the Remote Pilot Certificate for its weight class.
400ft ceiling, visual line of sight, and a waiver for night flying.
Site owner permission is separate from airspace permission, and you need both.
Raise all of it at brief stage. Almost every drone problem we have seen was a timing problem, not a legal one.

Nobody in Odisha has published a clear page on this, which is why so many of these conversations start from scratch. If you are planning a shoot and want to know whether your site is straightforward, send the location and we will check it before quoting.

Drone permissions in Odisha: what the DGCA rules mean for your shoot