GATE 2027 in Puducherry: Exam City, IIT Madras Zone, Karaikal and Mahe

The GATE 2027 exam-city list has a single entry under "Pondicherry": Puducherry. It sits in the IIT Madras zone, beside Tamil Nadu, the Telangana cities around Warangal, southern Kerala and parts of Andhra Pradesh.

The Union Territory itself is not one block of land. The Government of Puducherry describes it as the former French establishments of Puducherry, Karaikal, Mahe and Yanam, scattered across South India. Only Puducherry town has an exam city. That matters if your home is in one of the other three regions, because the zone rule works by city, not by territory.

The rule: you pick six cities, all from one zone. The list is tentative. GATE can add or remove a city and may allot you one outside your six. GATE 2027 is held only in India.

Karaikal is not an exam city, and a Karaikal address does not put you in Puducherry by default. You choose your six like anyone else. The Karaikal district site gives road distances of about 103 km to Thanjavur, 135 km to Puducherry and 168 km to Tiruchirappalli. All three are IIT Madras zone, so a Karaikal student can combine them, and Thanjavur is the nearest of the three by that table.

Mahe lies inside Kerala. The Mahe administration places it between Badagara and Thalassery, 24 km from Kannur and 58 km from Kozhikode. Kannur and Kozhikode are both IISc zone, so a Mahe student who wants to write close to home builds an IISc-zone list and leaves Puducherry off it. The Kozhikode page covers that side.

Yanam is surrounded by the East Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh, according to its district site. The listed cities in that part of Andhra, such as Kakinada-Surampalem and Rajamahendravaram (Rajahmundry), are IIT Kharagpur zone. They cannot be combined with Puducherry either.

Puducherry is surrounded by Tamil Nadu on its land sides, and the Tamil Nadu cities on the list are all in your zone. Sensible back-ups, starting close:

1. Puducherry
2. Cuddalore
3. Tiruvannamalai
4. Vellore or Kanchipuram
5. Chennai South or Chennai North (two separate entries)
6. Thanjavur or Tiruchirappalli, if your family is further south

Put a city higher if you have somewhere to stay there the night before. Villupuram, Chidambaram and Kumbakonam are not on the list, so students from those towns will usually pick Puducherry, Cuddalore or Thanjavur.

The Chennai page and the Tiruchirappalli page look at the same zone from their ends.

Plenty of Puducherry graduates work or study in Bengaluru or Hyderabad by the time they write GATE. Both are IISc zone, along with all of Karnataka, Kozhikode and Kannur. None of them can go on a list that includes Puducherry.

Exam city	Zone
Puducherry, Cuddalore, Vellore, Chennai North, Chennai South	IIT Madras
Thanjavur, Tiruchirappalli, Salem, Krishnagiri, Madurai, Coimbatore	IIT Madras
Bengaluru North, Bengaluru South, Hyderabad, Kannur, Kozhikode	IISc
Kakinada-Surampalem, Rajamahendravaram (Rajahmundry)	IIT Kharagpur

Decide where you will physically be in February before you fill the form. If that is Bengaluru, see the Bengaluru page and build an IISc list.

Registration ended with the special window on 16 October 2026. Applications flagged for defects can be fixed without a fee until 30 November 2026, per the official dates page. The paid data correction window is still TBA. City allotment is due on 4 January 2027, results on 19 March 2027, and the admit card date is TBA.

Your zone office and the organising institute are the same this year: IIT Madras, Chennai 600 036, helpdesk@gate.iitm.ac.in, 044-22578200. Write from your registered email with your enrolment ID.

The centre address comes on the admit card. Check it the day the card is out and plan the route. The Puducherry district administration lists daily trains to Villupuram, Chennai and Tirupati and frequent buses to Chennai and Bengaluru, and the Government of Puducherry puts the town about 135 km from Chennai airport. From Karaikal, the district site lists trains to Chennai, Thanjavur and Tiruchirappalli and PRTC and TNSTC buses. If you are allotted a city outside your own, travel the day before.

If you write DA and CS together, which GATE 2027 allows, the second centre may be different. Carry the printed admit card, the original photo ID from your form, and whatever else the admit card lists.

Two institutes in the territory have GATEiit pages. Pondicherry University is at Kalapet in Puducherry. NIT Puducherry is at Thiruvettakudy, Karaikal, about 130 km down the coast, as its own circulars show. Each page explains the GATE routes in detail.

Across the border, pages for IIT Madras, IIITDM Kancheepuram and Anna University cover the Chennai side, and NIT Trichy and IIIT Tiruchirappalli the south. Everything is on /institutes.

Your exam city has no bearing on admission anywhere.

GATEiit is free and online. It has no centre in Puducherry, Karaikal or anywhere else.

Begin with GATE DA if you are writing Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, or GATE CSE for Computer Science and Information Technology. Each paper page has the syllabus and its WhatsApp group link.

Use /pyq for past papers and /practice for topic-wise sets. The GATE DA 2027 guide and the GATE CSE 2027 guide set out a plan, and /guides has single-topic notes. All six exam days are weekends, so keep Saturday and Sunday mornings for full mocks. The GATE 2027 page and the exam-city overview have the national view.