GATE 2027 in Mumbai: Exam City Clusters, IIT Bombay Zone and Institutes

The official exam-city page does not have a plain "Mumbai" entry. Under Maharashtra it has two hyphenated names, and you have to choose between them (or take both):

Exam-city name on the form	Zone
Mumbai - Thane	IIT Bombay
Navi Mumbai - Rasayani	IIT Bombay
Vasai - Palghar	IIT Bombay

Each name is a cluster, not a single town. GATE does not publish the boundary of a cluster, so read "Mumbai - Thane" as "a centre somewhere in Mumbai or Thane" and "Navi Mumbai - Rasayani" as "a centre somewhere in Navi Mumbai or Rasayani". The admit card is the only thing that tells you the actual address.

What that means in practice:

• If you live in the island city or the western or central suburbs, Mumbai - Thane is the natural first choice.
• If you live in Navi Mumbai or towards Panvel, put Navi Mumbai - Rasayani first. The Raigad district administration lists its Panvel tahsil office with a Navi Mumbai address, so the Navi Mumbai area runs into Raigad district.
• Thane district's tehsils include Kalyan, Ulhasnagar, Ambarnath, Bhiwandi and Mira Bhaindar, none of which is a separate exam-city name. Mumbai - Thane is the closest named option for them.
• Vasai and Palghar are tehsils of Palghar district, carved out of Thane district on 1 August 2014. If you live around Vasai, the third cluster, Vasai - Palghar, may be the easier one.

Most Mumbai students should list all three clusters in their top four, ordered by which side of the city they will sleep on the night before. Since all three are in one zone, mixing them is allowed.

All six choices must be from one zone, and Mumbai's zone is large. The IIT Bombay zone covers 22 Maharashtra exam cities, Goa, and seven Gujarat cities: Ahmedabad, Anand, Bhavnagar, Gandhinagar, Rajkot, Surat - Bardoli and Vadodara.

A sensible list for someone who lives in Mumbai:

1. Mumbai - Thane or Navi Mumbai - Rasayani, whichever is home
2. The other of the two
3. Vasai - Palghar
4. Pune
5. Nashik
6. Ratnagiri, or Surat - Bardoli if you have family in south Gujarat

Pune also has its own city page. The point of the last two slots is somewhere you could reach and stay overnight if GATE cannot fit you into the metropolitan clusters. A back-up you could never get to is wasted.

The other Maharashtra names, for students whose home is elsewhere in the state: Ahilyanagar (Ahmednagar), Akola, Amravati, Baramati, Chandrapur, Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar (Aurangabad), Dhule, Jalgaon, Kolhapur, Latur, Nagpur, Nanded, Sangli, Satara, Solapur - Pandharpur and Wardha.

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

No Maharashtra city is in another zone, which makes the state simpler than Telangana or Uttar Pradesh. The catch is for the many students in Mumbai colleges and jobs whose families live across the border. Their home cities are on the list, but in other zones, and cannot be combined with any Maharashtra or Gujarat choice:

Home city	Zone on the official list
Indore, Ujjain	IIT Delhi
Bhopal, Jabalpur, Gwalior	IIT Kanpur
Belagavi, Hubballi/Dharwad, Kalaburagi, Bidar	IISc
Hyderabad	IISc
Adilabad, Nizamabad	IIT Madras
Raipur, Bhilai-Durg	IIT Kharagpur

So a form reading "Mumbai - Thane, Pune, Indore" is invalid. Decide where you will actually be in February. If you plan to go home to Indore for the exam, the whole form becomes an IIT Delhi-zone list. If you will be in a Mumbai hostel or office, stay with the IIT Bombay zone.

The IIT Bombay zone is coordinated from Powai, so for Mumbai students the zone office is in the same city. The contact on the official page:

• IIT Bombay, Powai, Mumbai – 400 076: gateoffice@iitb.ac.in, 022-25767068, 022-25767022

Use it for exam-city and centre questions, writing from the email ID you registered with and quoting your enrolment ID. IIT Madras organises GATE 2027 as a whole; application questions go to helpdesk@gate.iitm.ac.in or 044-22578200.

The scrutiny-defect rectification window closes on 3 November 2026, and the data correction window is still TBA on the important dates page. Until it opens, treat your current city order as fixed.

GATE 2027 is over three weekends: 6 and 7 February, 13 and 14 February, and 20 and 21 February 2027. The city allotment notification is due on 4 January 2027, which tells you which cluster you got. The admit card date is TBA; the admit card gives the centre address and reporting time.

A cluster name such as Navi Mumbai - Rasayani can put you some way from where you live. The day the admit card comes out, find the centre, work out the route from where you will sleep the night before, and plan to arrive with time to spare for a morning session. If you are allotted Nashik, Pune or another back-up, travel the day before.

If you write two papers, the two-paper page says the second paper's centre may be different, though in the same city. Check both addresses.

Carry the printed admit card and the original photo ID you gave in the application, plus anything else the admit card lists. Its instructions decide what goes into the hall.

IIT Bombay, at Powai, is the one institute in Maharashtra with a GATEiit page, and the page explains its GATE routes for DA and CSE candidates.

Within the same zone, IIT Gandhinagar in Gujarat also has a page. Further afield, IIT Indore in Madhya Pradesh, IIT Dharwad in Karnataka and IIT Hyderabad in Telangana are covered too. The full list is on /institutes.

Your exam city has no link to admission. Writing GATE in Mumbai - Thane does nothing for an IIT Bombay application. Pick the exam city for convenience on the day and pick institutes on their own merits.

GATEiit is an online site with no centre or office in Mumbai or anywhere else. Everything on it is free and works from a hostel in Powai or a long train commute.

Begin with your paper. GATE DA is Data Science and Artificial Intelligence; GATE CSE is Computer Science and Information Technology. Each page sets out the syllabus, and GATE 2027 allows DA and CS together as a two-paper combination.

• Solve past papers year by year on /pyq, then drill weak topics on /practice.
• Follow the GATE DA 2027 preparation guide or the GATE CSE 2027 preparation guide, and browse the other guides.
• The DA and CSE paper pages link a WhatsApp group if you want to talk through questions with other aspirants.

If you work in Mumbai, keep full mock tests for Saturday and Sunday mornings, since every GATE 2027 session falls on a weekend. For other cities, see the exam-city overview and GATE 2027.