The Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad (IIMA) was founded in 1961 as a unique collaboration between the Government of India, Government of Gujarat, local industrialists of Ahmedabad, Ford Foundation and the Harvard Business School, and has emerged as a world-class management institute. The IIMA Archives, launched in November 2017, preserves institutional and architectural memory and periodically disseminates historical information about the institute to the IIMA community and the general public. It holds a large collection of physical and digitized documents related with the foundation and evolution of the institute. The IIMA Oral History project is a key initiative of IIMA Archives that captures the experiences of several people associated with the institute from its formative years. IIMA Archives also holds a collection of documents and directories related with the business history of India.
It is open to the general public for research and will be of interest to researchers working on
- Evolution of higher educational institutions in India
- Evolution of management thought
- Evolution of business in India
- International collaborations between India and the US
- Evolution of alumni associations
- History of Ford Foundation and Harvard Business School
- History of Ahmedabad
- Architectural History
- Personalities associated with IIMA such as Vikram Sarabhai, Kasturbhai Lalbhai, Jivraj Mehta, Douglas Ensminger, Louis Kahn, Ravi Matthai, Kamla Chowdhry, I G Patel, Keshub Mahindra, Dwijendra Tripathi and several others, including hundreds of faculty and staff, an alumni base of over 10,000 students and an equally large pool of managers who participated in management development programmes at IIMA
On November 10, 2021, the IIMA Archives launched 'Brick by Brick: A Journey through IIMA Archives', an exhibition that invites you to relive the fascinating journey of IIMA and experience the stories of its people and objects. Please do visit the exhibition, which is spread over two galleries (Galleries 1 and 2) on the ground floor of Dorm 15 in the Main Campus of IIMA. You can also visit the online version of the exhibition.
Information on the history of IIMA is also available at the Ford Foundation Archives, Harvard Business School Archives and Louis Kahn Archives.
IIMA Archives seeks donations of documents and memories from people associated with IIMA in the past. More generally, it also seeks digital donations that shed light on the history of business in India.