Cost of Living in Surat. Prices Updated Dec 2020.

Good to see this thread finally!

I’m Indian and have been location independent for almost 3 years since I left my job. Keep my home-base in Bangalore for now and travel for 3-4 months of the year in various coworking/coliving setups around Asia and Europe for and a bit of luxury + offbeat travel here and there

Happy to catchup with the remote folks if anyone is around my locations anytime.

I am a digital nomad from India. From this month end I am moving out and becoming a non-resident and will live outside India for at least 6 months in the year.

Getting Dubai residency, but I also have a long term visa for Thailand, so I will be there a lot… And of course, travel.

Planning to experience different places of the world as I get the opportunity.

Hi… I am not a nomad… yet… But got some plans to make the switch by the end of this year. I’m a web developer working on AngularJS and .net framework as of now. Eventually planning to learn new things once I get out of my current job and find some time.

Just wondering, anyone here in Mumbai right now? Or planning to come down?

Hi! Abhishek from India. I work on marketing for online course instructors. I was in Bangalore in 2016 and moved to NCR in 2017.

Working out of unboxed coworking in Noida.

I might be in Goa in a week-ish. I was planning to work from there for a couple of weeks in Jan, but had a motorcycle accident and extended my Calcutta time (bedrest, can’t leave the house, no idea when the bike’ll be running again). Hopefully I’ll head out again this week or next

Ping me if anyone’s around, or if anyone is thinking about heading to Calcutta later in ’17; I’m working with one coworking space here and one self defense training center, so I’ll likely be using Calcutta as a base for most of the year.

Hi all,


I am currently at Pune, working with a startup. My last visit was to Pondicherry(26-05 dec 16).


Pondicherry was a very good experience for me, found a coworking place also, interacted with few bloggers and enjoyed the beach very much. Very clam and interesting city to travel.


Planing more trip around the year to explore more of our beautiful country. Next I’m planning to Goa, kerala, and then north.


Let me know for any tips and suggestions!!

Cheers


Ravi

@greenhorn, I speak Bengali and understand almost zero Hindi Like most Bengalis, I just assume everyone speaks either English or Bengali. It works surprisingly well; I’ve ridden Calcutta – Kargil – Leh – Bangalore – Calcutta camping for three months. People are friendly; if you make a little effort, everyone helps. I had the same experience in Tijuana, where my Spanish is atrocious.

@shefali, I was just in Goa last month, but I’m back in Calcutta now. Any chance you’re heading to this side of the country? What projects are you working on?

I’m from India. I’m not technically a nomad but a location independent entrepreneur who travels (or at least tries to) frequently. My travels have mostly taken me outside India but | am looking forward to travelling in India more and discovering our wonderful motherland.

My main problem with travelling in India is that I don’t know the language well – I can only speak basic Hindi (its a long story!) which makes me feel a bit insecure travelling solo so always looking for travel companions.

If any of you guys are in New Delhi area right now – would love to meet up for a beer/coffee. It’s hard to find people of the same mindset and flexible schedules that I have. .

Hi,


Myself madhukar. I am from bangalore. I am been into nomad from last few months. I run my own software consultancy called datamantra.io

My first nomad experience been in nearby city mysore. We are group of 4 stayed for few weeks there. I also been to bangkok for 2 weeks in feb.

If you are planning to come to bangalore and need any help in planning to stay and work in south part of india feel free to reach out to me.

Hi all,

Found this thread really interesting. Me and my partner (Srishti) started our digital nomading journey about 6 months ago. We both are freelancers in the field of Web Design & Development & we work remotely for clients all across the globe. I would like to share our experience till date.

Originally from Delhi, we initially stayed in Pune for about 4.5 months, which was a pleasant experience. Pune has got amazing weather, happy to help people (opposite of Bangalore), reliable internet connection (Airtel 4G), plenty of dine-out & food-delivery options, & moderately priced AirBNB homes (35k-45k/month for 1BHK). There are more than a few weekend getaway options around Pune as well. We visited Mahabaleshwar (breathtaking in monsoon), Lavasa, Lonavala & Mumbai.

During our time in Pune, we adopted a cute chihuahua puppy (Angel), who joins us in all our adventures now. We moved to Goa at the end of November to experience this exotic state in its best season. To our surprise, Goa turned out to be way below our expectations.

Since we both were brought up in Delhi, we had a certain level of expectations regarding infrastructure, quickness of services, & generally everything. We are not proud of this fact, and our working on becoming more adjusting day-by-day. Goa felt way too slow & laid back to us. Small things like getting an internet connection, communicating with AirBNB hosts, hunting for a co-working space, etc. took longer time than expected. Since we are freelancers, we like to track hours spent during each task, converting it to money using our hourly rate, & then taking a call if its worth it or not. (TIME = MONEY)

Goa is a beautiful place to be if you all you want to do is enjoy. In the last ~45 days here, we ended up spending most of our time figuring out little things. After 30 days staying at 1 apartment near Anjuna, our host ditched us and asked us to move out because she was able to rent it out to someone who could pay higher than us. We had to spend a hilarious amount of money since it was the season time leaving us very demotivated.

Internet situation is also really bad here. We have to keep switching between Vodafone 3G, Reliance Pro 3, & Tata Photon Plus for regular connectivity. Luckily, we found a coworking space in goa, which is really good. Lets see how it works out now.

We are planning to move to Thailand (Bangkok or Chiang Mai), as soon as we can. We are here in Goa till end of March at least.

We have also stayed in Bangalore for about 7 months (before Pune), though not as nomads. I had a regular job at a startup in Kormangala, & Srishti was figuring out between job & freelancing.

Any questions about Pune, Goa, Bangalore, travelling with a pet or anything else are more than welcome. I am also on the slack channel hashtagnomads as @shreyansqt.

Thanks for reading!


Shreyans & Srishti

Hi guys,


I am from Hyderabad and looking to start a nomadic lifestyle soon. We host via Airbnb regularly and have hosted a few digital nomads as well. If any of you comes to Hyderabad, would love to host you or at least connect. BTW, Hyderabad has terrific internet speeds, good co-working spaces and reasonably cheap accommodation. So it could be a good choice of place for digital nomads.

You can connect with me on Twitter: @sneha_magapu

Hey @ankitdas123


It’s good to see Indians too here &I I was wondering the same when browsing the forum.


I’m a digital nomad from last one year. Before getting married in Dec-14, I usually travelled across India and now me n my wife started travelling to other countries


Right now in Thailand n here for another 12 days.

After Thailand, next is Malaysia or any other country where getting Visa wouldn’t be an issue.

By profession I’m


a blogger n this gives me independence to work from anywhere.

Let’s stay connected!

Hey @ankitdas123 nice to see someone starting a thread from India! What exactly do you folks do? I can connect you with a startup or two who are looking for people like you (one is this) Apart from that I would love to meet up with you guys (I move around India quite a bit). Also, I can offer a room at my flat in Delhi when I am not around (you will have to share the flat with a friend of mine.)

Hey @keerthiko, how’s the internet there? (I am building a website) And is that the beach-house you are talking of (I read about it here)?

I am too lazy to introduce myself again, so read this

Find me on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram

I’m Indian (US passport), back in India for about four years now, semi-nomadic. I have a great base of operations in Calcutta, so my work (web development, mostly Drupal in the past, mostly front-end code at the moment) infrastructure is relatively stable. Airtel’s 8Mb/s DSL line usually seems to get me 1MB/s+ on torrent downloads if you need an idea of download speeds, and it goes down maybe once every year or two for a day at most.

In other words, it’s about 10x more reliable than my Comcast line back in Chicago.

Calcutta has a couple of coffee shops that are great co-working locations, and some of the places I’ve traveled would be great coworking hubs (Dharamsala, Goa). These do tend to be much more foreign-influenced / touristy than the four Indian metro cities.

There’s some serious culture clash between modern distributed teams and the traditional Indian tech corp. The professional context here is very different from what I was used to back in the US. (These may be irrelevant if you’re not working in tech.) Quick examples:

1. I can’t manage teams if the team members are older than me; some employees will throw a shitfit if they find out their manager is younger than them, or that someone younger than them makes more cash than they do. A lot of people stubbornly cling to the idea that they’ll be exploited when they’re just starting out, but that salary increases come with age, not with experience. I started working when I was 18, so this is sometimes a problem for me; I frequently have more experience (especially on larger projects) than others my age here.

2. A lot of people are in tech because it’s good money + stability, so their parents told them to do tech. They’re not necessarily passionate about tech or even curious about learning new things. This is a very Calcutta problem; the workforce here is complacent. It’s much better in Bangalore or Bombay.

3. (Similar to #1) Older team members are always right. It doesn’t matter if the younger devs are the ones reading about git and wondering why the rest of the world insists on version control; if your senior dev doesn’t want to learn it, no one in the office is going to be allowed to advocate for it. Team aren’t very agile when it comes to inhaling new tech, or new workflows. We’re slow to keep up.

4. Work-from-home generally means your employees aren’t working at all, which results in deeply suspicious managers who are cranky and aggressive if employees even suggest a remote work policy.

All of this means that India doesn’t really turn out digital professionals who gradually shift into increasingly remote professional lives. There are a few of us who’ve headed back from the US or elsewhere, and far fewer of us who’ve gotten there while working in India, but it’s a pretty small group.

D.

My wife started working in New Delhi for a NGO, hence I visit often. The internet speeds are not great. In fact, my observation was that it has been deteriorating. 3G speeds were reasonable to hold a Skype video call in 2012, not anymore.

A home/office based broadband by providers like Airtel is perhaps what is required.

I’m from the U.S. but currently in India since the end of January. First month was Goa, then Varanasi and now Rishikesh for 2 weeks. It’s not really setup well for Nomads, however I can’t speak for larger cities like New Delhi or Bangalore.

Currently, I get great Internet through my home-stay to work on projects, but that’a about it.

Hello,

I am a digital nomad, travelling since last six months in India. Since January, I am staying at Bagnalore, will be here till March end. After this I plan to move to Goa, or Kerala. I have heard few places in Kerala that provide reliable internet.

I am also planning to start doing international travel, Europe being on top of my list after Thailand, but I am not sure of how visas will work and trying to understand more about it.

In case of hostels in India, I found that youth hostels are also good.


If you are looking particularly for Bagalore, Airbnb worked good for me. Initially I stayed at a PG but that wasn’t good at all and expensive too. Most PGs are good for students who just come to crash there at night.

In Bangalore, co-working spaces are good specially in Koramangala and Indiranagar. I will recommend Bhive for it, it costs 5k per month, but even if you start with daily passes, it costs Rs. 200 per day with tea/coffee included.

In and all, I would be happy to answer anything about Bangalore and would love to know from everyone about VISAs to other countries specially Europian ones.

Cheers

Hey @ankitdas123

Though I am not a true nomad, and still aspiring to be one I have experienced this lifestyle for a short while. I am also in the process of becoming a full time digital nomad. I am organising a meet up in Bangalore on April 5th 2015 for digital nomads.

http://www.meetup.com/bangalore-digital-nomads-meetup

Lots of interesting stories. I’m Indian. Born and brought up in India. I’ve been traveling and generally working online for the past three+ years. Mostly international travel too.

Yes, visas are a pain but if you have a US Visa, the list of countries that will let you in with a visa on arrival is quite a bit longer (Costa Rica, turkey, panama, etc.). A schengen visa also adds quite a few schengen and non schengen countries (croatia and some others) to the list.

It’s not generally unpleasant to travel as an Indian but you can draw weird looks at times, especially at immigration when you present an Indian passport. It’s mostly because people aren’t used to seeing Indian travelers a lot. Not expected from a ‘poor’ country.

Hey @ankitdas123, I’m Keerthik, from India


I actually grew up in the Middle East, studied in Boston, and worked in California, but I’m an Indian citizen (for all the hardships that comes with that and trying to be a nomad).

There’s a lot to talk about being a nomad as an Indian, but I’ll tell you this much – in many ways our experience is very different from that of most of the others you’ll find in this forum. They either hold citizenships affording them better mobility (even if they are of Indian origin), maybe are white and have a different social atmosphere, or maybe are SEAsian and moving around SEAsia doesn’t feel very different from leaving home for them, etc. Being an Indian-citizen nomad in other countries is very different.

For the record I’m in India right now, but I do my best to spend as little time as possible here because for the most part it is very non-conducive to getting any work done compared to any other country I’ve been in

Anyway, feel free to ask me anything. What would you like to know more about?