GATE 2027 in Tadepalligudem: IIT Kharagpur Zone and Andhra's Split

Plenty of district towns in Andhra Pradesh are missing from the GATE list. Tadepalligudem is not one of them. The official exam-city page has it as a separate entry, spelt exactly "Tadepalligudem", in the IIT Kharagpur zone.

Our town is a revenue division of West Godavari district, according to the district administration, and the district headquarters is Bhimavaram. Bhimavaram is also an exam city, in the same zone. So a West Godavari student has two entries inside the district and can put both on one form.

The entry names a city, not a centre. GATE allots the centre, and its address appears only on the admit card. The list is tentative: GATE may add or remove a city and may allot one outside your six choices. GATE 2027 is held only in India.

The rule behind every choice you make: you pick six cities, and all six must come from one zone. Andhra Pradesh has twenty entries on the list, and they are spread across three zones, so this rule bites harder here than in most states.

Zone	Andhra Pradesh entries
IIT Kharagpur (yours)	Tadepalligudem, Bhimavaram, Eluru, Rajamahendravaram (Rajahmundry), Kakinada-Surampalem, Vijayawada, Visakhapatnam, Vizianagaram, Srikakulam
IIT Madras	Guntur, Amaravati, Chirala-Bapatla, Ongole, Nellore, Tirupati, Chittoor, Kadapa, Nandyala
IISc	Kurnool, Anantapur

Vijayawada and Guntur are often spoken of together, yet they fall on opposite sides of this table. The same goes for Amaravati. Kurnool and Anantapur belong to IISc in Bengaluru.

What this means in practice: Tadepalligudem works with anything in the first row, plus the zone's cities in Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and south Bengal. It does not work with Guntur, Amaravati or Kurnool. The Guntur and Kurnool pages explain the other two zones from their side.

West Godavari district, by its administration's own description, is bounded by the Godavari on the east, Eluru district on the west, Rajahmundry district on the north and Krishna district and the Bay of Bengal on the south. Eluru, headquarters of the neighbouring district, is an exam city in your zone, as are Bhimavaram and Rajamahendravaram (Rajahmundry). That makes a Tadepalligudem form easy to fill:

1. Tadepalligudem
2. Bhimavaram
3. Eluru
4. Rajamahendravaram (Rajahmundry)
5. Vijayawada
6. Kakinada-Surampalem

Put first the town where you will sleep the night before the paper. A student in a Vijayawada hostel may want Vijayawada at the top; one in Visakhapatnam can swap Visakhapatnam in for Kakinada-Surampalem. The Vijayawada and Visakhapatnam pages cover those ends of the zone. Bhubaneswar, Kolkata and Raipur are in the zone too, but for most of us they only matter if we will be living there in February.

If your form is already submitted, your six are fixed for now. The official dates page lists the paid data correction window, on candidate request, as TBA.

If you will spend final year or a first job in Hyderabad, the obvious idea is to put Hyderabad and Tadepalligudem on the same form. You cannot. Hyderabad and Nalgonda are in the IISc zone, and the other Telangana entries, Khammam, Kothagudem and Warangal among them, are IIT Madras zone. No Telangana city is in the IIT Kharagpur zone.

So decide where you will be. If you will be home in February, build an IIT Kharagpur list as above. If you will be in Hyderabad, an IISc list built around Hyderabad makes more sense, and the Hyderabad page shows how. Mixing the two is not allowed.

The same logic applies to anyone studying in Guntur or near Amaravati. Those cities are IIT Madras zone. Pick the zone of the place you will actually be.

Even though GATE 2027 is organised by IIT Madras, questions about a Tadepalligudem exam city go to the IIT Kharagpur zone office, listed as:

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

Application questions go to IIT Madras at helpdesk@gate.iitm.ac.in or 044-22578200. Write from your registered email and quote your enrolment ID.

The city allotment notification is due on 4 January 2027. The admit card date is TBA. Papers run on 6 and 7, 13 and 14, and 20 and 21 February 2027, all Saturdays and Sundays, and results are due on 19 March 2027. DA and CS are an allowed two-paper pair; if you take both, the official page says the second centre may differ but will be in the same city.

When the admit card comes, find the centre on a map that day and work out the route. If you are allotted Eluru, Vijayawada or Rajamahendravaram rather than home, go the previous evening. Carry the printed admit card, the original photo ID you gave in your application, and only what the admit card allows.

NIT Andhra Pradesh is in our own town. The institute's site says its permanent campus is on 172.6 acres beside the Chennai-Kolkata highway (NH-16), on the old air-strip lands of Tadepalligudem, and that it has run fully from that campus since January 2020. Its GATEiit page explains its GATE routes for DA and CSE candidates.

Further afield in the state, GATEiit has pages for IIT Tirupati and IIIT Sri City, and in Hyderabad for IIT Hyderabad, IIIT Hyderabad and University of Hyderabad. The full list is on /institutes.

Keep the exam city and admission apart in your mind. Writing GATE in Tadepalligudem does nothing for NIT Andhra Pradesh, and writing it in Vijayawada costs you nothing anywhere.

GATEiit is a free online site. It has no centre, office or classes in Tadepalligudem or any other town, so everything below works from a hostel room or from home.

First settle your paper. GATE DA is Data Science and Artificial Intelligence; GATE CSE is Computer Science and Information Technology. Each page has the syllabus and the link to that paper's WhatsApp group, where aspirants discuss doubts.

Then use previous papers on /pyq and topic sets on /practice, with the GATE DA 2027 preparation guide or the GATE CSE 2027 preparation guide as the plan. The other guides take single topics in depth. Since every exam day is a weekend, keep Saturday and Sunday mornings for full timed mocks. The GATE 2027 page and the exam-city overview have the national picture.