Mr. Keshub Mahindra (1923-2023) was one of the most influential Indian business leaders in the second half of the twentieth century and steered the Mahindra group from a small firm importing steel and assembling jeeps to one of the flagship business groups of India with a major presence in the automobile and tractor sectors.

He was born on 9 October, 1923, in Shimla and was the son of Jagdish Chandra Mahindra, one of the founders of the Mahindra group. He obtained a BSc. In Economics at Wharton, University of Pennsylvania, in 1947, and immediately joined Mahindra & Mahindra. He took over as Chairman in 1963, a position he maintained until he retired from the firm in 2012. He sat on the boards of numerous companies in India, and was renowned for his visionary leadership and philanthropy. He has been the only IIMA Chairperson to have served two terms and his tenure coincided with crucial developments in the political arena with the imposition of the Emergency and the first elected non-Congress government at the Centre which led to various demands on higher educational institutes that the Board had to navigate through. He envisaged the Board to defend academic freedoms and was committed to the idea of complete functional autonomy of the institute. Some aspects of his term at IIMA have been captured by the IIMA Oral History Project interview in 2018 when he was 95 years old and where he fondly recollected his time on the Board of IIMA.