GATE 2027 in Howrah: IIT Kharagpur Zone, Exam Cities and Institutes

It is easy to assume Howrah is counted under Kolkata. The official GATE 2027 exam-city list does not work that way. Under West Bengal, in the IIT Kharagpur zone, it prints eight names: Bankura, Berhampore, Hooghly, Howrah, Kharagpur-Midnapur, Kolaghat, Kolkata and Suri.

So "Howrah", "Kolkata" and "Hooghly" are three different choices. Ticking Kolkata does not mean you will be sent to a centre in Howrah, and ticking Howrah does not put you in the Kolkata pool. If you want to write on this side of the city, choose Howrah by name.

Because all three share a zone, you lose nothing by listing them together. That is the easy part of being in Howrah: your two nearest alternatives are already legal on the same form.

The general rules still apply. You pick six cities, all from one zone. The list is tentative, GATE may add or drop a city, and it may allot you a city outside your six if it has to. GATE 2027 is held only in India.

West Bengal is split between two zones, and the split catches people who live within a short trip of each other.

Zone	West Bengal exam cities
IIT Kharagpur	Howrah, Kolkata, Hooghly, Kolaghat, Kharagpur-Midnapur, Bankura, Suri, Berhampore
IIT Guwahati	Kalyani, Burdwan, Durgapur, Asansol, Siliguri

If Howrah is on your form, none of the five IIT Guwahati-zone names can join it. Kalyani is the easy one to get wrong, because it is in West Bengal and has an institute with a GATEiit page. It is still the wrong zone. The same applies to Dhanbad and Bokaro Steel City in Jharkhand, all four Bihar cities (Patna, Bhagalpur, Muzaffarpur, Purnea) and the north-eastern states.

Seen the other way, the IIT Kharagpur zone is wide. It covers all eight Odisha cities, Ranchi, Jamshedpur and Hazaribagh in Jharkhand, Raipur, Bhilai-Durg and Bilaspur in Chhattisgarh, and nine cities in Andhra Pradesh including Visakhapatnam. If your family is in Bhubaneswar or Jamshedpur, that city and Howrah can share one form.

The first three pick themselves for most of us. After that, choose by where you can reach early on a February morning, or where you have somewhere to sleep the night before.

1. Howrah
2. Kolkata
3. Hooghly
4. Kolaghat
5. Kharagpur-Midnapur
6. Bankura, Bhubaneswar or Jamshedpur, depending on where you have family

Put Kolkata first if your college or job is in Kolkata and you will be staying there in February. Order matters, so lead with the city where you will actually be.

On distance, IIT Kharagpur's own directions page says the town of Kharagpur is about two hours by train from Howrah railway station. That gives you a sense of what a Kharagpur-Midnapur allotment would mean. For anything further, plan to travel the day before.

If you will be at home in Kalyani, Burdwan or Durgapur during the exam weeks, the sensible thing is to build an IIT Guwahati-zone list instead. The Kalyani and Durgapur pages cover that side. You cannot mix the two lists.

Exam-city questions from Howrah go to IIT Kharagpur, the zone's coordinating institute. The contact as listed: IIT Kharagpur, Kharagpur 721 302, gateonline@adm.iitkgp.ac.in, 03222-282091 and 03222-282095. Use the email ID you registered with and quote your enrolment ID.

For portal, payment or paper questions, the organising institute is IIT Madras: helpdesk@gate.iitm.ac.in, 044-22578200.

Registration has closed. The special window ended on 16 October 2026, and the official dates page still shows the data correction window as TBA. The city allotment notification is due on 4 January 2027. The admit card date is TBA, and the admit card is what names your exact centre and reporting time.

When it arrives, find the centre on a map that evening. A centre in "Howrah" may be well away from the part of Howrah you know, so plan your route from wherever you will sleep and leave a margin for traffic. If you write DA and CS together, which GATE 2027 allows, the official page notes that the second paper's centre may be different, though in the same city. Check both.

Carry the printed admit card, the original photo ID you entered in the form, and anything else the admit card asks for. Its instructions are final. Results are due on 19 March 2027.

The institute closest to home is IIEST Shibpur, at Botanic Garden, Howrah 711103. Its site describes it as the erstwhile B.E. College, established in 1856, and now an Institute of National Importance. Its GATEiit page sets out the GATE routes for DA and CSE candidates.

IIT Kharagpur is the other one most Howrah students look at, and its page does the same. Elsewhere in the state, students also look at NIT Durgapur and IIIT Kalyani. Both sit in IIT Guwahati-zone exam cities, which has nothing to do with whether they will consider you. The full list is on /institutes.

The exam city plays no part in admission. Writing GATE in Howrah gives no edge at IIEST Shibpur, and writing it in Kharagpur-Midnapur gives none at IIT Kharagpur.

GATEiit is a free online site. It has no centre or office in Howrah, Kolkata or anywhere else, and everything on it works the same from home.

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

Then use /pyq for past papers year by year and /practice for topic-wise sets. The GATE DA 2027 guide and the GATE CSE 2027 guide give a week-by-week plan, and /guides has the rest. Every exam day is a Saturday or Sunday, so if you commute to work, a full mock at the same weekend hour is the closest rehearsal you will get.

For the wider picture, see GATE 2027, the exam-city overview and the Kolkata page.