Indian Centre for Space Physics is engaged in studying terrestrial and extraterrestrial high-energy phenomena from meteorological balloon borne platforms. A complete payload system with such balloons is at the most about 5 kg of weight. One has to adopt innovative and optimal design for various components of the experiment, so that the data can be procured at decent heights of ∼35 to 42 km; at the same time, some scientific goals are achieved. We mainly describe the instruments in detail and present their test and calibration results. We discuss how we implemented and tested three major instruments, namely, a Geiger–Müller counter, a single-crystal scintillator detector, and a phoswich type scintillator detector for our missions. We also present some flight data of a few missions to demonstrate the capability of such experiments.