IIM Calcutta’s flagship programme runs from the Joka campus in south Kolkata across two years and six terms. The table below collects the figures that are on the record. The sections after it deal with the two features that separate the programme from its closest peers, plus the mechanics of picking second-year courses.
| Item | Detail |
|---|---|
| Founded | November 1961, by the Government of India in collaboration with the Alfred P. Sloan School of Management (MIT), the Government of West Bengal, the Ford Foundation and Indian industry |
| Qualification | MBA. Since the IIM Act, 2017 made the IIMs degree-granting bodies, the programme awards a degree; earlier cohorts received a post-graduate diploma |
| Structure | Two years, six terms, three to an academic year, each running roughly ten to twelve weeks with examinations folded in |
| Credits | Minimum 93, maximum 105 credit points, excluding term papers |
| First year | Compulsory. Term I is 18 credits; Terms II and III are 15 credits each |
| Sample first-year courses | Corporate Financial Reporting & Analysis (Term I, 3 credits); Operations Research (Term II, 3 credits); Corporate Finance (Term III, 3 credits) |
| Summer internship | 8 weeks, between the first and second year, compulsory |
| Second year | All elective, listed under eleven academic groups |
| Batch size | 470 students in the 62nd batch (2025-27); 456 students took part in the 60th batch’s final placements |
| Programme fee | About Rs 27 lakh for the two years, per Careers360’s IIM fee table for the 2024-26 batch. The institute does not publish a consolidated fee page for the flagship MBA |
Course titles, credit weights and the term a subject falls into are revised between cohorts, so the handbook a cohort receives and the current curriculum pages on iimcal.ac.in are the versions to trust.
The finance catalogue
The 1961 founding was done with MIT’s Sloan School, and the analytical bias of that arrangement is still legible in the course list. Statistics for Management and Microeconomics both fall in Term I; Operations Research is a Term II course. All of it lands before a student has chosen anything.
Finance is where the accumulation is most visible. The compulsory sequence alone runs Corporate Financial Reporting & Analysis in Term I (3 credits), Cost Management and Risk Management in Term II (1.5 credits each), and Corporate Finance in Term III (3 credits) — a required first-year course in risk management is not standard across Indian MBA cores. Built on that base, the Finance & Control group’s published elective list includes Options, Futures & Derivatives, Business Valuation, Investment Analysis & Portfolio, Fixed Income Markets, Financial Risk Management, Credit Risk Management, Treasury Management and Foreign Exchange Markets, Private Equity and Venture Capital, Bank Management, Strategic Cost Management, and Topics in Financial Services. That is eleven titles from a single academic group, and the institute’s own description of the second year claims it offers more electives than any other B-school in India.
The recruiting record tracks the catalogue. In the final placements for the 60th batch, reported in March 2025, finance accounted for 114 of the 538 offers made to 456 students, second only to consulting’s 201, with Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Citi, Barclays, UBS and HSBC among the recruiters. For a candidate aiming at markets, investment banking or risk, that pairing of course depth with repeat recruiter presence is the specific argument for Calcutta over a peer institute. General prestige is not, because the peers have that too.
How second-year electives are allocated
Nothing in the second year is compulsory.
The curriculum pages list every course under eleven academic groups — Finance & Control, Marketing, Operations Management, Strategic Management, Economics, Organizational Behavior, Human Resources Management, Management Information Systems, Public Policy and Management, Business Ethics and Communication, and the Management Centre for Human Values — plus a set of joint offerings that cut across groups. The binding constraint on how many of those courses fit is the credit band: 93 points minimum, 105 maximum, term papers excluded.
What the official pages do not publish is the allocation rule. They list the courses offered in recent academic years and stop. Public accounts of elective selection at the IIMs, including material from the vendor whose course-bidding software several IIMs use, describe a points-based auction: each student gets a fixed budget of bidding points and spends it across a set of courses, with oversubscribed sections going to the higher bids. The institute has not confirmed those specifics, so the mechanism is best treated as broadly known and the point totals as unverified. The planning implication survives either version — a second-choice elective needs to be a course worth attending, because a seat in a popular one is not guaranteed. Students who want to go deeper than a taught course allows can also take term papers under faculty supervision, which is the closest thing the programme has to a research track.
The summer placement process
Every student is expected to complete an eight-week industry internship between the two years, and the institute’s placement page states that most firms offer full-time positions on the strength of it. The same page is blunt about one sector: many firms, especially investment banks, hire on a strict pre-placement-offer policy, taking interns and converting them after evaluating two months of work, so for those roles the internship is close to the only entry route.
The process that hands out those internships runs early. Summer placements for the 62nd batch (2025-27) concluded on 17 October 2025, a matter of months after the batch arrived. In a hybrid, cluster-cohort format that included a “dream offer” policy, 183 recruiters made 510 offers to 470 students. The average monthly stipend was Rs 1.85 lakh and the median Rs 2 lakh; the highest domestic stipend was Rs 4.5 lakh a month and the highest international one Rs 6 lakh. The shape of the round moves year to year, and not only upward: 2024 saw 564 offers from 175 recruiters, so the 2025 count was more recruiters and fewer offers.
The calendar arithmetic is the part worth doing before you arrive. A student interviewing for a finance role in mid-October is somewhere inside Term II. Corporate Financial Reporting & Analysis is behind them, Cost Management and Risk Management are in progress, and Corporate Finance is a Term III course that has not been taught yet. Case practice, guesstimates and finance technicals therefore have to run in parallel with Term I and Term II coursework, inside ten-to-twelve-week terms with continuous assessment and no reading break.