GATE 2027 in Patna: IIT Guwahati Zone, Exam Cities and Institutes

The official exam-city page has four entries for Bihar: Bhagalpur, Muzaffarpur, Patna and Purnea. All four are in the IIT Guwahati zone. Patna is listed once, as "Patna", with no split into parts of the city.

That puts Bihar in the same zone as the whole north-east (Guwahati, Shillong, Agartala, Imphal and the others), Sikkim, five West Bengal cities (Asansol, Burdwan, Durgapur, Kalyani, Siliguri) and two Jharkhand cities, Dhanbad and Bokaro Steel City.

GATE's rule is simple. You pick six cities, and all six must come from one zone. The list is tentative, GATE may add or remove a city, and it may allot you a city outside your six if it has to. GATE 2027 is held only in India.

This is where a Bihar form most often goes wrong. The cities many of us think of as close to home are split across three zones:

City on the list	State	Zone
Patna, Muzaffarpur, Bhagalpur, Purnea	Bihar	IIT Guwahati
Dhanbad, Bokaro Steel City	Jharkhand	IIT Guwahati
Ranchi, Jamshedpur, Hazaribagh	Jharkhand	IIT Kharagpur
Varanasi, Gorakhpur, Prayagraj, Lucknow, Kanpur	Uttar Pradesh	IIT Kanpur

So a form with Patna on it can carry Dhanbad and Bokaro Steel City, and cannot carry Varanasi, Gorakhpur, Prayagraj, Ranchi, Jamshedpur or Hazaribagh. Jharkhand is the confusing one because it is divided city by city. Uttar Pradesh is simpler for a Patna student: Varanasi, Gorakhpur and Prayagraj are all IIT Kanpur zone.

If you try to add Varanasi as a back-up to Patna, the form will not take it. Pick your zone first, then your cities.

With Patna first, all your other choices come from the IIT Guwahati zone. Bihar gives you four, and Jharkhand's two IIT Guwahati cities make six without leaving the region. One way to fill it:

1. Patna
2. Muzaffarpur
3. Bhagalpur
4. Dhanbad
5. Bokaro Steel City
6. Purnea, or Asansol if that suits your travel better

Reorder the back-ups by where you can actually reach on a winter morning, and where you could stay the night before. Family in Bhagalpur counts for more than a few kilometres on a map. If your home town is not one of the four Bihar names, choose the listed city you can reach most easily and put Patna next to it.

If you are doing your B.Tech outside Bihar, the zone rule forces one decision: where will you physically be in February? GATE 2027 falls on three weekends, 6 and 7, 13 and 14, and 20 and 21 February.

• If you will be at home, build an IIT Guwahati-zone list around Patna as above.
• If you will be in a hostel in Varanasi, Prayagraj or Gorakhpur, an IIT Kanpur-zone list is the honest choice. The Lucknow page covers that zone.
• If you will be in Ranchi or Jamshedpur, stay with the IIT Kharagpur zone, which also has Kolkata and all of Odisha. See the Kolkata page.

Registration for GATE 2027 has closed; the special window ended on 16 October 2026. The data correction window is shown as TBA on the official dates page, so do not count on changing your cities until GATE announces it.

Exam-city questions from Patna go to IIT Guwahati, the zone's coordinating institute. The contact as listed: IIT Guwahati, Guwahati 781 039, gate@iitg.ac.in, 0361-2582751. Write from your registered email and quote your enrolment ID.

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

The city allotment notification is due on 4 January 2027. The admit card, whose date is still TBA, gives the exact centre and reporting time. Patna's centres need not be near your locality, so the day the admit card comes out, find the centre on a map and plan the route from where you will sleep. If you are allotted Bhagalpur, Purnea or Dhanbad, go the day before.

If you write DA and CS together, which GATE 2027 allows, the centre for the second paper may be different, though in the same city. Check both.

Carry the printed admit card, the original photo ID you gave in the form, and whatever else the admit card lists. Its rules on what you may take in are final. Results are due on 19 March 2027.

Two institutes in Bihar will be on your mind: IIT Patna, at Bihta near Patna, and NIT Patna, on Ashok Rajpath in the city. Each page sets out its GATE routes for DA and CSE candidates.

GATEiit pages that set out GATE routes for DA and CSE candidates, for institutes in neighbouring states:

• IIT (BHU) Varanasi and MNNIT Allahabad, Uttar Pradesh
• IIT (ISM) Dhanbad, Jharkhand
• IIT Kharagpur and NIT Durgapur, West Bengal
• IIT Guwahati, Assam

The rest are on /institutes. Your exam city has nothing to do with admission. Writing GATE in Patna does not help with IIT Guwahati, and writing it in Varanasi would not help with IIT (BHU).

GATEiit is an online site. It has no centre or office in Patna or anywhere else, and everything on it is free.

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

Then solve past papers year by year on /pyq and topic sets on /practice. The GATE DA 2027 guide and GATE CSE 2027 guide give a plan, and /guides has more. Since every exam day is a Saturday or Sunday, take your full mocks at the same time on weekends.

For the national picture, see GATE 2027 and the exam-city overview.