The museum spreads over an area of about 200 acres on the Shymala Hills in the city.

[2][3][4] In 1970, as part of an Indian Science Congress session held in Calcutta, "Sachin Roy, President of Anthropology and Archaeology section, in his presidential address, emphasised the need for a ‘Museum of Man’ in the country".

[1] It was then the Madhya Pradesh State Government offered 200 acres of land and consequently the museum was formally established in the state and then inaugurated on 21 April 1979 by union minister Dr Pratap Chandra Chunder.

[1] Alongside exhibiting material culture and intangible heritage presentations at the museum, the Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya has also preserved and presented diverse forms of natural features, landscapes, and ecosystems that hold significant value in terms of their cultural, scientific, aesthetic, or ecological importance.

According to Kalyan Kumar Chakravarty, formerly director (1994–2000) of the IGRMS and member secretary (2004–2009) of the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, "the museum at Bhopal does not consider the past alone as its preserve, the Indian tribal or prehistoric man as its only concern, or the indigenous traditional knowledge systems as the only areas of its investigation because it has concerned itself seriously with issues of scientific research and investigation, with a bearing on community well being, with different areas of ethno-sciences, with interface between contemporary and traditional architecture, with urban and country planning, in and ex situ preservation of germ-plasm in minor forest timber produce, viable patterns of water and physical resource sharing and their impact on cultural patterns in the Himalayan system, and, with measures to deal with ecological degradation".