The Fellow Programme of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta is a full-time doctoral programme in different fields and related disciplines of Management. The objective of the programme is to prepare students for careers in teaching and research in Management or in the related disciplines, and also for positions outside academics, which require advanced research and analytical capabilities. The fellow program at IIMC focuses on training outstanding scholars whose teaching and research will advance management education and practice, and is capable of meeting the continued need for qualified faculty in leading business schools in India and abroad.

Many of its graduates, are now serving in research environments in industrial firms around the world, and are in top academic positions in the leading business schools in India and are leaders in their fields.

Two kinds of needs are addressed through the Fellow Programme. There is, as is widely recognized, a pressing shortage of quality faculty resources in some critical Management Disciplines. A major reason for this shortage is the inadequacy of healthy Indian doctoral level programmes in these essential areas of study. The Fellow Programme at IIMC directly addresses this need of Management Schools. The other need is of a dynamic nature. There is hardly another field of education that has to cope with a comparable level and quality of change as does the field of management studies. We are dealing here neither with classical learning nor with the settled and purely academic disciplines. We are dealing with the need to respond to the new knowledge created through innovations and new experience. This unending grappling with frontiers of knowledge creation cannot be accomplished without the development and nurturing of a research programme at the very core of our academic activities.

The programme offers a unique opportunity to engage in high-quality intradisciplinary as well as interdisciplinary research. A distinctive feature of the Institute is that its faculty resources are not broken up into water-tight departments, but are treated as belonging to one unit. This makes for a degree of cross-fertilization of ideas as also a quality of multidisciplinary research that is practically impossible to attain under the conventional university set-up. At the same time, a long-standing strength of IIM Calcutta has been its recognition of specialized research in the basic disciplines at par with and even exceeding the standards of the best universities.

The Institute started the Fellow Programme in 1971 to contribute increasingly to the body of systematic knowledge in the management sciences, especially in the Indian context, through the interactive process of teaching and research. Apart from doing that, the Fellow Programme also serves the needs of government, industry, financial institutions and development agencies by making available to them individuals with a high level of research experience.

The student, on completion, is awarded the title "Fellow of the Indian Institute of Management Calcutta". The Fellow Programme in Management and the Fellow Programme in the areas related to Management are recognised as being equivalent to a Ph.D. by the Association of Indian Universities. The Government of India has also recognized the Fellowship in Management of this Institute as being equivalent to a Ph.D. degree in management education of a recognised Indian University.