Institutions · Latur
Barshi Road, Latur · Founded May 1961
Eight colleges on twenty-two acres in the middle of Latur, teaching some ten thousand students — built with rupees collected one at a time from farmers at the grain market. Three generations of the Lahoti family have been part of it: one who helped found it, one who presides over it, and one now on its management.
May 1961
In the early 1960s Latur was a small town in Osmanabad district with no facilities for higher education. A student who wanted a degree left for Hyderabad, Pune or Bombay — which meant that for the children of farmers, agricultural labourers and working families, a degree was simply out of reach.
Ten citizens set out to change that. Among them, named in every founder list the Society’s colleges still publish, was Raja Narayanlalji Lahoti — alongside Manikrao Sonavane, Chandrashekhar Bajpai, Madanlal Biyani, Shantibhai Shah, Nathmal Innani, Ranaba Mandade, Ramgopal Rathi, Tamanappa Utage and Keshavrao Sonavane.
The money came from an unlikely place. Manikrao Sonavane, who chaired the market committee, persuaded the farmers of Latur to give one rupee each as they sold their produce.
A campus that now teaches ten thousand students was paid for in single rupees, handed over at a grain market by people who would never study there.
The Society was established in May 1961. The following month a combined College of Arts, Commerce and Science opened, its foundation stone laid by Shri Shriprakash, then Governor of Maharashtra. Manikrao Sonavane was its first President, Chandrashekhardada Bajpai its first Secretary.
For its motto the Society took the fourteenth mantra of the twenty-fifth chapter of the Yajurveda — Ā no bhadrāḥ kratavo yantu viśvataḥ: let noble thoughts come to us from all directions of the universe.
1961 · 2006 · Today
Families endow institutions all the time. What is less common is staying with one for sixty years — through the unglamorous middle decades when a college is neither new nor famous and simply has to be run.
Three members of the Lahoti family appear in the Society’s own published records, across three distinct roles and three distinct generations.
I
1961 · The Founding
One of the ten citizens of Latur who established the Society, and named in every founder list its colleges publish. He is also remembered in the Raja Narayanlal Lahoti English School, founded under the Shri Marwadi Rajasthan Shikshan Sanstha.
II
Since 2006 · The Custodian
President of the Society across successive governing terms since 28 November 2006. Four of the eight colleges — pharmacy, a second pharmacy institute, architecture and interior design — opened under his presidency.
III
Today · The Next
Joint Secretary of the Society and President of Dayanand Science College, where he opens the research conventions the campus hosts each year.
One who built it, one who governs it, one who will inherit it.
It is the same arrangement the family has used everywhere else on its list of institutions, with one difference. Elsewhere the Lahotis endowed and stepped back, handing the running to a local body or to the state. Here they endowed and stayed — and sixty years on they are still in the room where the decisions are taken.
A Mini University
What opened in 1961 as a single combined college has become eight independent institutions on one campus, each with its own principal, building and administration. The Society’s colleges are credited with bringing into being the “Latur Pattern” — the method of intensive teaching for which the town became known nationally, and which sent a generation of Marathwada students to the top of competitive examinations.
1961
1967
1970
1971
2009
2017
2018
A town that once had nothing beyond school now offers pathways into research, law, enterprise, healthcare, the built environment and the humanities — without anyone having to leave home for them.
1 June 2013
The concluding ceremony of the Society’s Golden Jubilee was held at Latur on 1 June 2013. The platform assembled that day says a good deal about what the institution had become.
President of India
Attended the concluding ceremony of the Golden Jubilee.
Two Governors
The Governors of Maharashtra and of Punjab — the latter a son of Latur himself.
The State
The Chief Minister of Maharashtra, with the Ministers for Higher Education and for Education.
Fifty-two years after ten men collected rupees at a grain market, the President of the Republic came to Latur to mark what those rupees had built.
Continue
President Since 2006
The man who has led the Society for close to two decades, and what the office has meant.
The profile →Seven in Latur Alone
The Dayanand Society is one of several institutions the family supports in the town, and one of twenty across the Deccan.
All institutions →The Latur Branch
Raja Narayanlal Lahoti, Seth Bankatlal Lahoti, Seth Puranmal Lahoti and the rest of the Marathwada line.
The people →