Margdarshak

In keeping with its pioneering spirit, FOSTIIMA gave a new direction to management education when it instituted the MARGDARSHAK AWARDS– in the memory of the founding faculty of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad– for outstanding HR corporate managers. These faculty gave up lucrative assignments in the USA and the industry to foster management education in India. They were visionaries, intellectual giants, teachers of a very tall stature and famous institution builders. If K. V. Kamath, Raghuram Rajan, Chetan Bhagat, A. S. Banga, Harsha Bhogle, Srikant Datar, and many others, are household names today, it is in no small measure due to the efforts of these founding faculty members.

It seemed quite an anomalous situation where the products of an institution attained recognition, but the people who went into making these institutions famous remained in the shadows. We at FOSTIIMA were very well aware that while it is an established practice in the USA to acknowledge the institution builders, such an effort is lacking in India. The constraints of COVID notwithstanding, FOSTIIMA launched its first edition of MARGDARSHAK AWARDS in 2020. The response of the corporate sector was way beyond anything we could have imagined. They resonated so deeply with the industry that we were convinced that MARGDARSHAK AWARDS were an idea whose time had come. We have defined the following categories of awards: