The first of the IIMs to be established, IIM Calcutta is a fully autonomous institution offers several postgraduate, executive and doctoral programmes along with been engaged in research and consultancy. It was established in collaboration with the MIT Sloan School of Management, the government of West Bengal, the Ford Foundation and the Indian industry. Initially, the institute was located in Emerald Bower, Barrackpur Trunk Road, Kolkata, and later moved to the current campus in Joka in 1975.

IIM-C strives to establish itself as an international centre of excellence in management education. It is the only Indian business school that is a member of the Global Alliance in Management Education (CEMS), which is an elite club of 28 premier business schools from across the world. And in March 2014, IIM-C has garnered the coveted accreditation from the Association of MBAs (AMBA), the topmost European accreditation body for B-schools, the first such global sanction that the institute has managed to bag.

IIM-C will enjoy this accreditation for five years after which the institute will have to apply for renewal. The institute has been given accredited status for the Post Graduate Programme for Executives and Post Graduate Programme-Master in Business Management (PGP-MBM) courses by the AMBA for five years, according to IIM-C director Saibal Chattopadhyay.

The accreditation will help the institute not only benchmark its programmes globally but also help to attract foreign students and tie-ups. Andrew Main Wilson, AMBA's chief executive said in a release: “AMBA accredits just 1 per cent of the world’s MBA business schools and IIM Calcutta’s initial five-year accreditation reflects the quality of their MBA programmes, faculty and students.

IIM-C is especially renowned for its finance-related courses, and is widely considered to be one of the best business schools in the world for finance. Rediff.com India Chairman and CEO Ajit Balakrishnan is the current Chairman.

With a mission to develop innovative and ethical future leaders capable of managing change and transformation in a globally competitive environment, IIM-C has been in the news recently as its students joined political party Trinamool Congress for internship.

In addition to providing holistic environment for the students, the institute also pays attention to its faculty. IIM-C undertakes faculty exchange programme with partner universities so that the faculty members are exposed to the pedagogy there and also to enrich their students with the Indian context.

For the students, there are many areas of development such as Finance Lab, a first-of-its-kind state-of-the-art financial research and trading lab with real-time access to national and international financial data and market information; Centre for Entrepreneruship and Innovation where its main objective is to generate innovative ideas and implement them pragmatically for the benefit of the society. The Indian Institute of Management Calcutta has set up the Centre for Corporate Governance (CCG) to create and disseminate knowledge in the area of corporate governance. The IIMC Centre for Corporate Governance has been recognized by the Government of India as a “Centre for Excellence” for imparting training to directors of companies registered under the Companies Act 1956.