Suratculture & etiquette

Gujarat has been dry since 1960 under what is now the Gujarat Prohibition Act 1949, and Surat is dry without any of Ahmedabad's asterisks. Foreign nationals and people who do not reside in Gujarat can apply for a permit through the Prohibition and Excise Department — a short visitor permit, or a longer permit on documented health grounds for applicants over 40 — and can then buy limited quantities from licensed shops attached to certain hotels. The one place in the state where alcohol is lawfully served without a personal permit is GIFT City, and that is 250 km away next to Gandhinagar, well outside any Surat commute. Buying from a bootlegger, or carrying alcohol into the state, is a criminal offence with imprisonment on the statute. Newcomers underestimate this because everyone tells them it is available anyway. It is, illegally, and people are periodically prosecuted.

If your visa is valid for more than 180 days you must register within 14 days of the arrival stamp. FRRO Ahmedabad has jurisdiction over the whole of Gujarat, so a Surat address is filed there, 265 km north, with local Foreigners Registration Officer functions performed by the police here. In practice the application itself is filed online through e-FRRO and is normally decided without you going anywhere — but if you are called in, the office is in another city, and that is a day. Line up an address you can evidence before the fortnight runs out, and ask your employer for a guest-house or serviced-apartment letter to register against if the lease will not be ready in time.

The Gujarat Disturbed Areas Act 1991 lets the District Collector notify parts of a city where no transfer of property may take place without the Collector's prior written permission — and the Act defines transfer as sale, gift, exchange, lease 'or otherwise', so an ordinary tenancy is caught, not only a sale. Notified areas exist in Surat as they do in Ahmedabad, and a March 2026 amendment renamed them 'specified areas' and widened who may object. A landlord in a notified area may simply not be able to let to you without a Collector's order, and an agreement made without one is exposed. Ask the question explicitly, in writing, before you pay a deposit — and confirm the current notified list with the Collectorate rather than relying on a broker's summary.

The Tapi runs through the middle of the city and the Ukai dam upstream controls how much water arrives. The 2006 flood submerged the great majority of Surat and remains the reference event every long-term resident measures against; the municipal corporation has built substantially better warning, drainage and embankment infrastructure since. That does not make the risk uniform. Low-lying riverside pockets in Rander, Adajan and Katargam behave differently from the higher ground at Vesu and Piplod. Before you sign, ask specifically what happened at that address in 2006 and in the worst monsoon since, and ask the neighbours rather than the agent.

Torrent Power holds the private distribution licence for Surat city, while DGVCL — Dakshin Gujarat Vij Company, the state utility — supplies most of the surrounding district and some peripheral areas. Two flats a few kilometres apart can therefore have different suppliers, different tariff structures, different outage records and different customer service. This is unusual in India and it is not something a listing will tell you. Ask which company bills the address, and ask a current resident about last summer rather than reading the tariff card.

Surat has one of the highest shares of internal migrants of any large Indian city. The diamond workshops of Varachha and Katargam are largely Saurashtra Patel; the textile mills and power looms of Pandesara and Sachin draw heavily from Odisha, Bihar and eastern Uttar Pradesh. The result is a city where Gujarati is the language of business and the old families, and Hindi is the working language of a very large part of the workforce. Ahmedabad is far more monolingual. For a newcomer this makes Surat easier to arrive in and slower to feel embedded in.