GATE 2027 in Rourkela: IIT Kharagpur Zone, City Choices and Institutes

On the official exam-city page, Rourkela appears once, as "Rourkela", among Odisha's eight cities:

Balasore-Bhadrak, Baripada, Bhubaneswar, Brahmapur, Cuttack, Dhenkanal, Rourkela, Sambalpur.

Every one of them is in the zone coordinated by IIT Kharagpur. That is good news compared with our neighbours. Jharkhand and West Bengal are each split between two zones, while Odisha is not, so if your home is in Cuttack or Balasore and you study in Rourkela, both can sit on the same form.

The rules from the same page: six choices, all from one zone. The list is tentative, GATE may add or remove a city, and it may allot you one that is not among your six. GATE 2027 is held only in India.

A few entries need a second look before you tick them.

On the list	State	Zone
Brahmapur	Odisha	IIT Kharagpur
Berhampore	West Bengal	IIT Kharagpur
Bilaspur	Chhattisgarh	IIT Kharagpur
Bilaspur	Himachal Pradesh	IIT Roorkee
Dhanbad, Bokaro Steel City	Jharkhand	IIT Guwahati
Durgapur, Asansol	West Bengal	IIT Guwahati

Brahmapur and Berhampore are different cities in different states, so pick the one you mean. The list has two Bilaspurs, and only the Chhattisgarh one belongs with Rourkela. Dhanbad, Bokaro Steel City, Durgapur and Asansol are the real traps: each sits in a state that also has IIT Kharagpur-zone cities, and the form will not accept them next to Rourkela. Kharagpur-Midnapur, by contrast, is in our zone.

Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh both have cities in our zone, so a Rourkela list can draw on three states, and Bengal too if you have family there. One way to fill the form:

1. Rourkela
2. Sambalpur
3. Ranchi
4. Jamshedpur
5. Bhubaneswar or Cuttack
6. Raipur or Bilaspur (Chhattisgarh)

If you study at a Rourkela college but will be at home in coastal Odisha for the exam weekend, put your home city first and keep Rourkela as a back-up. Choose back-ups by where you can stay the night before, not by how close a city looks.

The Ranchi, Bhubaneswar and Raipur pages describe those cities from their side.

Exam-city and centre questions for Rourkela go to the IIT Kharagpur zone office, listed as:

• IIT Kharagpur, Kharagpur 721 302
• gateonline@adm.iitkgp.ac.in
• 03222-282091 and 03222-282095

For the application portal or anything about the papers, the organising institute is IIT Madras: helpdesk@gate.iitm.ac.in, 044-22578200. Write from your registered email ID and quote your enrolment ID.

Registration closed when the special window ended on 16 October 2026. The data correction window is marked TBA on the important dates page, so treat your six cities as fixed unless GATE announces otherwise.

GATE's city allotment notification is due on 4 January 2027. The admit card, whose release date is still TBA, gives the exact centre and reporting time.

When it arrives, find the centre on a map and work out the trip from where you will spend the night. If you are allotted Sambalpur, Ranchi or Jamshedpur rather than Rourkela, travel a day early so a late train does not cost you the paper.

Writing DA and CS together is allowed in GATE 2027. The two-paper page says the centre for your second paper may be different, though in the same city, so read both entries on the admit card.

On the day, take the printed admit card, the original photo ID you gave in the application, and whatever else the admit card lists. Follow its instructions over anything else you read. Results are due on 19 March 2027.

NIT Rourkela is in the city, and its GATEiit page explains its GATE routes for DA and CSE candidates. Elsewhere in Odisha, IIT Bhubaneswar has a page too.

In the neighbouring states, GATEiit has pages for NIT Jamshedpur in Jharkhand, NIT Raipur and IIT Bhilai in Chhattisgarh, and IIT Kharagpur in West Bengal. Your exam city has nothing to do with where you can apply, so write GATE wherever suits you and apply anywhere your score allows. The full list is on /institutes.

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

Open your paper's page first. GATE DA covers Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, and GATE CSE covers Computer Science and Information Technology. Each page carries the syllabus and the link to that paper's WhatsApp group.

From there, solve previous papers on /pyq and topic sets on /practice. The GATE DA 2027 guide and the GATE CSE 2027 guide give a plan, and /guides has the rest. The six exam dates are all weekends, so keep Saturday and Sunday mornings for full mocks.

For the wider view, see GATE 2027 and the exam-city overview.