A distinctive aspect of India’s managerial elite is that it is dominated by people with an educational background in engineering. This paper unravels the history of how this major phenomenon arose, by tracking the evolution of management education in mid-twentieth century India. It emphasizes the significance of the network developed between the Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs) and Indian Institutes of Management (IIMs) and points to important contextual factors including the industrial recession of 1968–70 and admission test criteria that contributed heavily to the rise of the ‘technological manager’. Some of these factors continued to be important in the early twenty-first century, having implications on the diversity of educational backgrounds and diversity by gender among India’s managerial elite.