GATE 2027 in Cuttack: A Separate Exam City in the IIT Kharagpur Zone

We tend to speak of Cuttack and Bhubaneswar in one breath. The official GATE 2027 exam-city page does not. Under Odisha it lists eight entries, and "Cuttack" and "Bhubaneswar" are two of them.

That matters on the form. Each counts as one of your six. Putting down Bhubaneswar is not a vote for Cuttack, and the other way round. If you are happy writing in either, list both.

The district administration describes Cuttack as one of the oldest districts of Odisha and the city as the state's capital until the move to Bhubaneswar in 1948. It also notes the city sits between the Mahanadi to the north and the Kathajodi to the south. None of that changes the exam rules, but it is a reminder that Cuttack is a city of its own, on the list and off it.

The list is tentative. GATE may add or remove a city, and may allot one outside your six choices. GATE 2027 is held only in India.

The rule is short. You choose six exam cities, and all six must come from the same zone.

For a Cuttack student this is the easy case. All eight Odisha entries are IIT Kharagpur zone:

Odisha exam cities (all IIT Kharagpur zone)
Cuttack, Bhubaneswar, Dhenkanal, Balasore-Bhadrak, Brahmapur, Baripada, Sambalpur, Rourkela

So you can fill every slot without leaving the state. One way to order it from Cuttack:

1. Cuttack
2. Bhubaneswar
3. Dhenkanal
4. Balasore-Bhadrak
5. Brahmapur
6. Sambalpur, Rourkela or Baripada

Treat this as a starting point. Move a city up if you have family there or a friend's room for the night before. A back-up you cannot reach by the reporting time is of little use.

The zone is bigger than Odisha. It also covers Kolkata, Howrah and Kharagpur-Midnapur in West Bengal, Ranchi and Jamshedpur in Jharkhand, Raipur in Chhattisgarh, and the north coastal Andhra cities from Srikakulam and Visakhapatnam down to Vijayawada.

Odisha is not split. Three of its neighbouring states are, and that is where a Cuttack form goes wrong.

Where	Can go with Cuttack (IIT Kharagpur)	Cannot go with Cuttack
Jharkhand	Ranchi, Jamshedpur	Dhanbad, Bokaro Steel City (IIT Guwahati)
West Bengal	Kolkata, Howrah, Kharagpur-Midnapur	Durgapur, Asansol, Kalyani (IIT Guwahati)
Andhra Pradesh	Srikakulam, Visakhapatnam, Vijayawada	Guntur, Amaravati, Tirupati (IIT Madras)
Bihar	none	Patna and every other Bihar city (IIT Guwahati)

If you study in Dhanbad, Durgapur or Patna, that city's zone is IIT Guwahati, and you will have to pick between it and home. The same goes for Guntur, which is listed in the same state as Visakhapatnam but sits in a different zone. The Kolkata, Jamshedpur and Visakhapatnam pages cover the parts of our zone you are allowed to use.

Plenty of Odisha students do their B.Tech or first job in the south. Those cities are in other zones: Hyderabad, Bengaluru North and Bengaluru South are IISc zone, and Chennai South and Chennai North are IIT Madras zone. None of them can share a form with Cuttack.

So the real question is where you will sleep on the exam weekends: 6 and 7, 13 and 14, or 20 and 21 February 2027. If you are coming home, use the Odisha list above. If you are staying put, build a list in that zone with the help of the Hyderabad, Chennai or Bengaluru page.

If your form is already in, your six are fixed for now. The official dates page shows the paid data correction window, on candidate request, as TBA.

Exam-city questions for Cuttack go to the zone's coordinating institute, listed on the official page as IIT Kharagpur, Kharagpur 721 302, gateonline@adm.iitkgp.ac.in, 03222-282091 and 03222-282095. Questions about the application itself go to the organising institute, IIT Madras, at helpdesk@gate.iitm.ac.in or 044-22578200. Write from your registered email and quote your enrolment ID.

The city allotment notification is due on 4 January 2027. That tells you the city. The admit card, whose date is still TBA, tells you the centre and reporting time. Look the centre up on the day you download it. Even a Cuttack resident may not know a campus on the edge of the city, and if you have been given Dhenkanal or Brahmapur instead, travel the evening before a forenoon paper.

DA and CS are a permitted two-paper pair in 2027. The official page says the second paper's centre may be different, but in the same city.

Carry the printed admit card, the original photo ID you gave in the application, and anything else the admit card lists. Results are due on 19 March 2027.

Three institutes in our state have GATEiit pages, each explaining its GATE routes for DA and CSE candidates:

• IIT Bhubaneswar, whose official address is Argul, Khordha
• IIIT Bhubaneswar, at Gothapatna, Bhubaneswar
• NIT Rourkela, at Rourkela

IIT Kharagpur, the zone office, is across the border in West Bengal. The full set is on /institutes.

Your exam city and your admission are separate matters. Writing GATE in Cuttack does not help at IIT Bhubaneswar, and writing it in Rourkela does not help at NIT Rourkela.

GATEiit is free and online only. It has no centre, office or classroom in Cuttack or any other city.

Start with your paper's page: GATE DA for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, or GATE CSE for Computer Science and Information Technology. Each has the syllabus and a link to that paper's WhatsApp group.

Solve past papers year by year on /pyq, then drill topics on /practice. The GATE DA 2027 guide and the GATE CSE 2027 guide set out a plan, and /guides has the rest. Every exam day is a Saturday or Sunday, so keep weekend mornings for full timed mocks.

The Bhubaneswar and Rourkela pages cover the same zone from elsewhere in Odisha. GATE 2027 and the exam-city overview have the national picture.