GATE 2027 in Surat: The Surat - Bardoli Exam City and IIT Bombay Zone

Look for Surat on the official GATE 2027 exam-city page and you will find it only as "Surat - Bardoli", under Gujarat, in the zone coordinated by IIT Bombay. The list has no separate "Surat" or "Bardoli" to pick. It is one choice.

The pairing tells you where centres may be. Bardoli is a taluka of Surat district with its own Prant (sub-division) office, according to the district's sub-division listing. So a candidate who lives in Adajan or Katargam should not assume the centre will be a short auto ride away. It may be in the city, or it may be out on the Bardoli side. The admit card settles it.

The official page sets three rules. You pick six cities. All six must come from one zone. The list is tentative: GATE can add or drop a city and can allot one outside your six if needed. GATE 2027 is held only in India.

Surat candidates are lucky with zones. Every Gujarat city on the list is IIT Bombay zone, and so is every Maharashtra city, and Goa:

State	IIT Bombay zone exam cities
Gujarat	Ahmedabad, Anand, Bhavnagar, Gandhinagar, Rajkot, Surat - Bardoli, Vadodara
Maharashtra	22 cities, including Vasai - Palghar, Mumbai - Thane, Navi Mumbai - Rasayani, Nashik, Dhule, Jalgaon, Pune and Nagpur
Goa	Goa

That means you can mix Gujarat and Maharashtra freely. If you study in Pune or work in Mumbai, Surat - Bardoli can still be your first choice with those cities behind it.

Some towns you might expect, such as Bharuch, Navsari or Valsad, are not on the list at all. You cannot pick them, so do not wait for them to appear.

The cities to watch are the ones families in Surat often have links to in Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan. Indore and Ujjain are in the IIT Delhi zone, and so is Udaipur. None of them can go on a form that has Surat - Bardoli on it.

If you would rather write in Indore because you will be home there in February, the whole form becomes an IIT Delhi-zone list, with Ujjain, Udaipur, Jaipur and similar cities as back-ups. The Indore page works through that case. Bhopal is different again: it is IIT Kanpur zone, so it cannot sit with either Surat or Indore.

A list that stays close to south Gujarat could be:

1. Surat - Bardoli
2. Vadodara
3. Vasai - Palghar
4. Anand
5. Ahmedabad
6. Mumbai - Thane, or Nashik if you have family there

Move the back-ups around by where you could sleep the night before, which matters more than the map. A relative's house in Vadodara or Vasai is a better fallback than a city where you would arrive at dawn by the first train. The Ahmedabad page and the Mumbai page cover those ends of the zone.

Exam-city questions go to the IIT Bombay zone office, as listed on the official page:

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

Write from your registered email ID with your enrolment ID in the subject. Questions about the portal or the papers go to the organising institute, IIT Madras (helpdesk@gate.iitm.ac.in, 044-22578200).

According to the important dates page, the application data correction window (on candidate request, with a fee) is still TBA. The city allotment notification is due on 4 January 2027, the admit card date is TBA, and results are due on 19 March 2027. The page says every date is liable to change.

When the admit card arrives, find the centre that evening and check whether it is in the city or towards Bardoli. If it is on the far side, work out the trip and leave early. Anyone flying back for the exam should know that the district's how-to-reach page puts Surat airport 11 km from the city.

Take the printed admit card, the original photo ID you gave in the application, and whatever else the admit card lists. If you registered for DA and CS together, the two-paper page says the second paper's centre may differ from the first, though in the same city.

In the city itself is SVNIT Surat, listed on its website at Surat 395007. Its GATEiit page explains the GATE routes for DA and CSE candidates. Elsewhere in Gujarat, IIT Gandhinagar has a page too.

Further afield, people from here often look at IIT Bombay, which also runs our zone, VNIT Nagpur, IIT Indore and IIT Goa. The full list is at /institutes.

The exam city has nothing to do with admission. Writing at a Surat centre gives no edge at SVNIT, and writing in Pune costs you nothing there.

GATEiit is an online site and nothing more. It has no centre, office or classroom in Surat or any other city, and everything on it is free.

Go to your paper page first: GATE DA for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, or GATE CSE for Computer Science and Information Technology. Each has the syllabus and a WhatsApp group link. DA and CS can be taken together as a two-paper combination in GATE 2027.

For questions, use the previous papers on /pyq and topic sets on /practice. The GATE DA 2027 guide and the GATE CSE 2027 guide give a study plan, and /guides has more. Every exam day is a Saturday or Sunday, so practise full mocks at weekends.

The GATE 2027 page has the full timeline, and the city overview links the other city pages.