Foundations & Trusts · The Founding Instrument
Directed by will, 21 April 1956 · Constituted by deed, 10 June 1974
One-quarter of an estate, set aside in perpetuity for hospitals and educational institutions. Seventy years later the instruction is still being carried out — most visibly at an eye hospital in a part of Hyderabad that did not exist when it was written.
21 April 1956
Rai Saheb Pannalal Hiralal Lahoti was a merchant-industrialist of the textile economy of the Deccan before Independence — Managing Director of the Mahboob Shahi Kulbarga Mills, and holder of the titles of Rai Saheb and afterwards Rai Bahadur.
None of that is why he is remembered. In a will dated 21 April 1956 he appointed executors to administer his estate and directed that one-quarter of its fund be devoted to hospitals and educational institutions. The executors were left to judge how that share should be divided between the two.
A donation is a decision made once. This was a standing instruction his descendants could not revisit, argue with, or quietly let lapse.
That is the significant part. He took a quarter of what he owned out of the reach of everyone who came after him and pointed it at people he would never meet. Titles lapse with the man who holds them. This did not.
He also declined to be prescriptive. The will names two fields and no beneficiaries — leaving each generation of trustees to work out what hospitals and schools in the Deccan actually needed in their own time. Seventy years on, that restraint is why the instrument still functions.
10 June 1974
A direction in a will is binding but inert. It cannot hold property, open an account, receive a donation or enter an agreement. For eighteen years the charitable share existed as an obligation on executors rather than as an organisation.
A formal deed executed on 10 June 1974 changed that, giving the founder’s direction a permanent institutional form as the Rai Saheb Pannalal Hiralal Lahoti Charitable Trust. The record shows it holding properties at Hyderabad and Hingoli — the two ends of a family presence that spanned the former Hyderabad State.
1956 is when the family decided. 1974 is when the decision acquired hands.
Both dates matter and they are often conflated. The will is the moral act; the deed is the machinery that let it outlive the people who made it. Everything the Trust has funded since — every scholarship, every hospital contribution — was possible because someone took the trouble to convert an instruction into an institution.
Hospitals and Schools
The mandate is deliberately narrow: education and medicine. Almost everything the family has built since sits inside those two words, and the later foundations grew out of them rather than replacing them.
Medicine · Named 2021
With the Trust’s support, the L V Prasad Eye Institute’s upgraded city centre was renamed the Lahoti Eye Centre. It moved to a larger facility at Kondapur in early 2026. LVPEI records the Trust among its patrons.
The eye centre →Education · 2020
The educational purpose continues through institutional support and scholarships, including an association announced with the Mahesh Foundation in 2020 — the founding mandate applied to students born half a century after it was written.
Across the Deccan
Schools, colleges, hostels, a polytechnic and hospital contributions across Hyderabad, Gulbarga, Latur, Nanded and Ambajogai.
All institutions →The later bodies extended the same idea rather than departing from it. The Krishnakriti Foundation, from 2003, widened the family’s work into art and culture; the Franco-Indian Educational Trust, from 2017, carried it into international academic exchange. They are separate organisations, but they inherit the older Trust’s conviction that opportunity is best created through institutions rather than gifts.
Stewardship
Institutional records identify Shri Sureshchandra P. Lahoti as Chairman Trustee and, in more recent accounts, Managing Trustee. Later members of the family, among them Prshant K. Lahoti, have shared in the Trust’s stewardship and carried its purposes into related educational and cultural work of their own.
Trusteeship of this kind is unglamorous and largely invisible. It is meetings, accounts, applications, and the judgement of which requests to fund in a year when there is less to give than there are people asking.
The founder made one decision. Everyone since has made a hundred small ones, and the instrument survives because of those rather than the first.
That is where the Trust’s real significance lies. A charitable instruction written in the middle of the twentieth century is still shaping educational and medical provision in the twenty-first — not because it was well drafted, though it was, but because three generations chose to keep honouring it.
A Legacy in Time
1956
1974
2020
2021
2026
Continue
2003
The body that widened the family’s giving from education and medicine into art and culture.
The foundation →The Founder
The mills, the titles, and the will that outlasted both.
The profile →1860s to Today
Where 1956 sits in the family’s hundred and sixty-five years in the Deccan.
The timeline →