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Khan was born on 15 July 1914 in Agra. He was among the four sons and three daughters of Khansaahib Ameer Ahmed Khan and Mehmoodah Begum. His father, a police inspector, was inspired by the reformist thinking of Syed Ahmed Khan. In his early age, Khan's mother introduced him to the poetry of Maulana Hali and Muhammad Iqbal, the sermons of Abul Kalam Azad, and the Sufist philosophy of Rumi.

The Comilla Model (1959) was Khan's initiative in response to the failure of a Village Agricultural and Industrial Development (V-AID) programme that was launched in 1953 in East and West Pakistan with technical assistance from the US government. V-AID remained a government-level attempt to promote citizen participation in the sphere of rural development. Khan launched the project in 1959 on his return from Michigan, and developed a methodology of implementation in the areas of agricultural and rural development on the principle of grassroots-level participation. Initially, the aim was to provide a development model of programmes and institutions that could be replicated across the country. Advisory support in this respect was provided by experts from Harvard and Michigan State Universities, the Ford Foundation, and USAID. Practical help was also sought from Japan to improve the local farming techniques.  Comilla Model simultaneously addressed the problems that were caused by the inadequacy of both local infrastructure and institutions through a range of integrated programmes. The initiatives included the establishment of: a training and development centre; a road-drainage embankment works programme; a decentralized, small scale irrigation programme; and, a two-tiered cooperative system with primary cooperatives operating in the villages, and federations operating at sub-district level.  After Khan's departure from Comilla, the cooperative's model failed in independent Bangladesh because only a few occupational groups managed to achieve the desired success. By 1979, only 61 of the 400 cooperatives were functioning. The model actually fell prey to the ineffective internal and external controls, stagnation, and diversion of funds. This prompted the subsequent scholars and practitioners in microfinance, such as Muhammad Yunus of Grameen Bank and Fazle Hasan Abed of BRAC, to abandon the cooperative approach in favour of more centralised control and service delivery structures. The new strategy targeted the poorest villagers, while excluding the 'less poor'. However, Khan's leadership skills during the course of his association with the project remained a source of inspiration for these leaders, as well as other participatory development initiatives in the country.
Akhtar Hameed Khan