India · South Asia
Moving to Ahmedabad
Ahmedabad quick facts
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Cost of living in Ahmedabad
Can you move to India?
Pick your passport to see whether you can enter India — and what it takes to stay.
Entry rules come from github.com/imorte/passport-index-data, updated 17 February 2026. They change without notice — confirm with the official immigration service before booking.
Getting set up in India
Employment visa, e-FRRO, and the Ahmedabad registration office
India has no digital nomad or freelancer route. Salaried work means an employer-sponsored employment visa carrying a minimum annual salary, applied for from your country of residence before travel. Once you land, the fourteen-day registration clock starts from the immigration stamp, and everything downstream — bank, SIM, tenancy, licence — leans on that registration and on your PAN.
Read the full step-by-step guideLicences, the Gujarat RTO, and a city that is unusually easy to drive in
You may drive on a valid foreign licence accompanied by an International Driving Permit for up to a year from arrival or until your visa expires, whichever is sooner. After that you need an Indian licence from your local RTO, applied for through the Parivahan portal. Unusually for an Indian metro, Ahmedabad is genuinely drivable: wide roads on a grid, a working bus rapid transit corridor, real parking, and traffic that is dense rather than gridlocked.
Read the full step-by-step guidePAN, a resident rupee account, and getting onto UPI
PAN first, then the account, then UPI. Which account you may open turns on your residential status under the Foreign Exchange Management Act — not on your visa and not on your income tax status, which are three different tests. Someone employed in India is generally resident for FEMA purposes and opens an ordinary resident savings account rather than an NRE or NRO account. Branch staff sometimes default foreigners to NRO, and correcting that later is tedious.
Read the full step-by-step guidePrivate cover, the heat action plan, and the liquor permit on health grounds
Employer group cover is the normal route and Gujarat's private hospitals are good and inexpensive by any international measure. Two things are specific to here. Ahmedabad runs South Asia's first formal municipal heat action plan because heat genuinely kills people in this city, and the same medical system is the gateway to a liquor permit on health grounds, which is the route long-stay residents over forty actually use.
Read the full step-by-step guideAn Indian SIM on a foreign passport, and the verification gap
Every Indian SIM requires full identity verification, and for a foreign national that means passport, visa, photographs and proof of a local address, followed by a tele-verification step before outgoing calls and data switch on. Buy from a company-owned Jio or Airtel store rather than a kiosk. The number then becomes the key to UPI, bank one-time passwords and effectively every app you will use.
Read the full step-by-step guideThe April year, RNOR, and Ahmedabad's new 50% house rent allowance
You are resident if you spend 182 days or more in the financial year, or 60 days plus 365 across the preceding four. Most new arrivals then land in RNOR — Resident but Not Ordinarily Resident — for two or three years, during which foreign income is generally outside Indian scope. The new regime — section 115BAC under the old Income-tax Act 1961, and section 202 of the Income-tax Act 2025 that replaced it on 1 April 2026 — is the default, and the old regime must be actively elected. The local change worth knowing is that Ahmedabad has just become a 50% house rent allowance city: the Income-tax Rules 2026, notified on 20 March 2026, added Ahmedabad, Bengaluru, Hyderabad and Pune to the four long-standing metros with effect from the 2026-27 year.
Read the full step-by-step guideEach guide has verified costs, timelines, required documents, and the non-obvious gotchas — sourced from official government pages. Last verified August 2026.
Essential Gujarati phrases
Reading a list isn’t learning it. Globe Quest turns these into a trainer — hear each phrase spoken, drill them with spaced repetition, and get scored as you say them out loud.
What to know before you go
Gujarat is a prohibition state and the permit is a real document
CriticalGujarat has been dry since it was carved out of Bombay State in 1960, under what is now the Gujarat Prohibition Act 1949 — the Bombay Prohibition Act, renamed in 2011 and stiffened in 2017. Foreign nationals and people who do not reside in Gujarat can apply for a permit — a short visitor permit, or a longer permit on documented health grounds for applicants over 40 — through the Prohibition and Excise Department, and can then buy limited quantities from licensed shops attached to certain hotels. Carrying alcohol into Gujarat without a permit, or buying from a bootlegger, is a criminal offence with imprisonment on the statute. Newcomers consistently underestimate this because everyone tells them 'you can get it anyway'. You can, illegally, and periodically people are prosecuted.
Check whether your address falls under the Disturbed Areas Act before you sign anything
CriticalThe Gujarat Prohibition of Transfer of Immovable Property and Provision for Protection of Tenants from Eviction from Premises in Disturbed Areas Act 1991 — the Disturbed Areas Act, whose notified areas an amendment passed by the Gujarat Assembly in March 2026 renamed 'specified areas' — lets the District Collector notify parts of a city where no transfer of property may take place without the Collector's prior written permission. The Act's own definition of 'transfer' is sale, gift, exchange, lease 'or otherwise', so an ordinary tenancy is caught and not just a sale. Large parts of Ahmedabad are notified, including most of the walled city. In practice this means a landlord in a notified area may not be able to let to you at all without a Collector's order, and an agreement made without one is void. Ask the question explicitly, in writing, before you pay a deposit.
Register on e-FRRO within 14 days — the Ahmedabad FRRO is a full office
CriticalIf your visa is valid for more than 180 days you must register with the FRRO within 14 days of landing. Ahmedabad has one of India's fifteen full Foreigners Regional Registration Offices, at the Government Polytechnic campus in Ambawadi, with jurisdiction across Gujarat — so you are not dealing with a district police officer as a side duty, which is the position in most of India. The application itself is online through e-FRRO and needs proof of a Gujarat address, so line up accommodation first.
Apply for PAN in week one — the whole financial chain hangs off it
CriticalThe Permanent Account Number gates salary, bank accounts, large purchases and your tax return. Foreign nationals apply on Form 49AA rather than the Aadhaar-based instant e-PAN, which is not available to you. Without a PAN your employer may be required to deduct tax at a substantially higher rate, and getting that back means filing a return and waiting.
Vegetarianism here is structural, not a preference
ImportantAhmedabad has one of the highest vegetarian populations of any large city in the world, and a substantial Jain community for whom onion, garlic and root vegetables are also excluded. Many housing societies are vegetarian-only by their own rules and will say so during the flat viewing; the municipal corporation has also restricted non-vegetarian street carts on some main roads. None of this is hostile, but if you cook meat at home, raise it before signing rather than after.
May is genuinely dangerous and January is the reason people love it
ImportantAhmedabad regularly exceeds 45°C in May, and the city has run South Asia's first formal municipal heat action plan since 2013, written after the May 2010 heatwave produced more than 1,300 excess deaths in a single month. Between March and June, arrange work and errands before eleven in the morning. From late November to February the weather is superb, which is why Uttarayan, Navratri and the wedding season all cluster into the cool half of the year.
Top industries & employers
Pharmaceuticals
Zydus Lifesciences, Torrent Pharma, Intas, Amneal, Claris
Ahmedabad is one of India's two great pharmaceutical clusters, with a dense supply chain in bulk drugs and formulations running out along the Sanand and Vatva belts.
Financial services & fintech
GIFT City IFSC, NSE IX, India INX, Bank of America, HSBC
GIFT City in neighbouring Gandhinagar is India's only International Financial Services Centre — a separate regulatory regime with tax concessions, and unusually for Gujarat, an area where alcohol service has been permitted since December 2023.
Textiles & apparel
Arvind Ltd, Ashima, Chiripal, Aarvee Denim
Called the Manchester of India for a century, and still one of the world's largest denim producers. Arvind alone has supplied most global denim brands at some point.
Chemicals & industrial
Adani Group, Nirma, Torrent Power, Atul, GACL
The Adani Group is headquartered here, and the Gujarat chemical corridor is the largest in India. Gujarat produces a disproportionate share of the country's industrial output from a small share of its population.
Automotive & engineering
Tata Motors (Sanand), Maruti Suzuki (Hansalpur), MG Motor (Halol), Bosch
Sanand, half an hour west of the city, went from farmland to a major auto cluster inside fifteen years after Tata moved the Nano plant here from West Bengal in 2008.
Education & research
IIM Ahmedabad, CEPT University, NID, PRL, ISRO Space Applications Centre
IIM Ahmedabad and the National Institute of Design are India's most selective business and design schools, and both sit on campuses designed by Louis Kahn and Charles Correa respectively.
Where to go in Ahmedabad
The pols of the walled city
Neighborhood · Old City, east of the Sabarmati
Six hundred years of dense timber-fronted housing clusters, each entered through a single gate, which made Ahmedabad India's first UNESCO World Heritage City in 2017.
Local tip: The municipal corporation's heritage walk leaves from Swaminarayan Temple in Kalupur at around eight in the morning and ends at the Jama Masjid. Go on a weekday. Look for the chabutro — communal bird feeders on carved pillars in the courtyards, which are the detail nobody photographs.
Sabarmati Ashram
Landmark · Ashram Road, west bank
Gandhi's base from 1917 to 1930 and the starting point of the Salt March, kept deliberately austere.
Local tip: Free, and quiet in the early morning before the coach parties. The archive and the letters are the substance; Hriday Kunj, the two-room house he actually lived in, takes five minutes and is the point.
Manek Chowk
Food · Old City
A vegetable market by morning, a jewellery market by day, and from about nine at night one of India's great street-food squares.
Local tip: It genuinely changes function three times in twenty-four hours. Go after ten at night for the ghee-drenched sandwiches and kulfi. Cash and UPI both work; the stalls are numbered and locals order by number.
Adalaj Stepwell
Culture · 18 km north, toward Gandhinagar
A five-storey octagonal stepwell from 1499, descending into cool air and carved Indo-Islamic stonework.
Local tip: Twenty degrees cooler at the bottom than at the surface, which was the entire engineering point. Go at midday when the light drops straight down the shaft. It is on the way to GIFT City, so it pairs with a Gandhinagar trip.
Sidi Saiyyed Mosque
Landmark · Lal Darwaja, city centre
A 1573 mosque whose western wall carries a stone lattice of an intertwined tree so fine it became the emblem of IIM Ahmedabad and of the city itself.
Local tip: Only two of the ten jali screens are the famous ones, and they are best from inside looking out in late afternoon. It sits on a traffic island in the middle of the city and most people drive past it daily without stopping.
Nal Sarovar
Hidden gemNature · 60 km south-west
A shallow 120-square-kilometre wetland and Ramsar site that fills with flamingos, pelicans and cranes from November to February.
Local tip: Barely known outside Gujarat and almost empty on weekday mornings. Go before seven, take a flat-bottomed boat with a local boatman rather than a package, and bring binoculars — the birds keep their distance and the water is knee-deep for hundreds of metres.
Emergency numbers in Ahmedabad
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