IIM Ahmedabad opened in 1961, put together by the Government of India, the Government of Gujarat, Indian industry and Harvard Business School, with Vikram Sarabhai and the textile industrialist Kasturbhai Lalbhai driving the founding and Ravi J. Matthai arriving as its first full-time Director in 1965; Louis Kahn designed the red-brick campus. The Harvard link is the part of that history still visible in the weekly timetable, because that is where the case method came from and it has never left. The flagship two-year residential programme was the Post Graduate Programme in Management and ended in a diploma until the IIM Act of 2017 gave the institutes degree-granting powers — same programme, same selection, now an MBA.
What follows is that programme in time order, Term I through Term VI. Course titles and their term placement are revised by the faculty from batch to batch, so treat the ones named here as the currently published set and confirm any single title against the institute’s own course listing before planning around it.
Term I: about thirteen courses at once
414 students joined the PGP 2026-28 batch on 17 June 2026, the institute’s 63rd, alongside 44 in the food and agribusiness programme. Almost nothing about what they study in the first year is chosen. The core is prescribed for the whole batch (engineer, chartered accountant, economics graduate and doctor take the same courses in the same terms), and there is generally no route to test out of a subject already studied elsewhere.
Term I as published runs to roughly thirteen courses: Financial Reporting and Analysis, Microeconomics, Marketing-I, Quantitative Methods 1a and 1b, Operations Management-I, Human Resource Management I, Individual Dynamics, Legal Aspects of Business, Managerial Computing, Managerial Communication and Financial Markets, plus an OB induction. Each academic year splits into three terms, so you pass through six across the degree. Terms run roughly nine to twelve weeks (the institute quotes 9-14): the official programme page gives 10-14 weeks for the first-year terms and 9-12 weeks for the second-year ones.
That calendar does more work than it appears to. A trimester compresses an entire course, exams and grading included, into about a quarter of a year, so you sit end-term examinations three times annually instead of twice and accumulate more distinct courses than a semester system would permit. Quizzes, submissions and mid-terms stack inside a ten-week window. Term I tends to be the steepest adjustment of the two years, and the reason is seldom that one subject is impossible; it is that a dozen of them move at the same time. The first-year core adds up to about 23.80 credits and roughly 480 sessions.
Term I is also where the case method turns into a nightly workload. In many courses the case is the whole delivery mechanism, not an illustration attached to a lecture: you arrive having read and analysed the material, and the instructor runs the discussion without summarising it for you. A weekday evening means two or three cases waiting for the morning, each twenty pages or more with exhibits, and a study group meeting to argue through positions before class — which is where a good share of the learning happens and why the residential campus matters. You may be cold-called to open a case without warning, which turns an unread case from a private failure into a public one, and class participation counts for a real share of the grade in many courses. The institute writes and publishes its own cases through its case centre, so a good number of the ones you read are set in Indian firms under Indian regulatory conditions.
Term II: writing under a word limit
The second term adds Costing and Control Systems, Macroeconomics and Policy, Marketing II, Operations Management II, Quantitative Methods II, Human Resource Management II, Interpersonal Group Processes, Personal and Corporate Ethics, The Social and Cultural Environment of Business, and Transforming Business through Information Technology. It also brings Written Analysis and Communication-I, the course Ahmedabad has been associated with for decades, in which a structured written analysis of a case is submitted against a deadline and a word limit and marked hard on argument and concision.
One more Term II entry gives away the calendar: a Workshop on Interviews and Presentations. Summer recruiting begins early in the first year, which is part of why that year feels as compressed as it does: the internship process runs alongside the heaviest coursework of the degree.
Term III: integration before the internship
By the third term the foundational courses have done their job and the integrative ones arrive: Corporate Finance, Strategic Management, Government Systems and Policy Process, Business Research Methods, Marketing III and Organizational Dynamics. Term III also opens the first real choice of the programme, a flexi-core slot with options such as Written Analysis and Communication-II, Operations Management-III, Service Operations Management, Strategic Human Resource Management and Talent and Competency Management. The sequencing logic is deliberate: descriptive and functional material first, then courses that ask you to put the functions back together.
The summer internship
The internship runs eight to ten weeks across April, May and June, between the two academic years, with the institute’s corporate partners. It is a requirement of the programme. For a substantial part of the batch it also works as the main pipeline into a final job offer, since a strong internship is the usual route to a pre-placement offer from the same firm. That block therefore matters for placement season in a way the second-year timetable does not.
Term IV: bidding for a timetable
The second year inverts the first. Compulsory coursework largely disappears and you build a timetable from a pool of around 173 elective courses spread across 14 academic areas, from finance, marketing and strategy through operations, information systems and economics to public systems, agriculture and rural management, and entrepreneurship. Electives carry varying credit weights, often smaller than a core course, so more of them fit into a term. Second-year credits total somewhere between 19 and 22.
Seats in any section are finite, and popular courses are allocated by a bidding or preference-based mechanism, so you will not get every course you list.
Applicants often assume this year ends in a declared major. It does not: the transcript records the courses taken and nothing else, so a term loaded entirely with finance and a deliberately broad one are both legitimate uses of the year.
Terms V and VI: exchange, projects, and the exit
The last two terms are where the elective structure loosens further. Part of the second year can be spent on an international exchange term, on a faculty-supervised independent project, or on an intensive field course, all of which count towards the same credit total. The published elective list comes with less certainty than it looks like it should: whether a given course runs depends on faculty availability and on enrolment, so a seminar that ran for the batch above may not run for yours. Final placements land in this stretch, on top of whatever coursework you bid into.
One number to keep in view while planning any of it. The most recent programme fee the institute has published is for the PGP 2025-27 batch: ₹27,50,000 in total, of which ₹20,10,000 is tuition, with fees for later batches announced separately. Spread across six terms, that is a little over ₹4.5 lakh per term of teaching. Compare that full figure — not the tuition line on its own — against the salary you expect on the other side.
| Tuitionthe line the institute quotes separately | ₹20,10,000 |
| The rest of the programme feethe difference between the two published figures | ₹7,40,000 |
| Total programme fee, PGP 2025-27 batch | ₹27,50,000 |