People · Latur · Education
President, Dayanand Education Society, Latur
He presides over an institution his own family helped found. Since November 2006 he has led the Dayanand Education Society through successive governing terms — eight colleges, ten thousand students, and four new institutions opened on his watch.
28 November 2006
Laxmiraman Bankatlalji Lahoti assumed the presidency of the Dayanand Education Society on 28 November 2006, and has been returned to it across successive governing terms since. The Society’s colleges describe him in their own prospectuses as an eminent personality in the educational field.
He inherited a body founded in 1961 by ten citizens of Latur — among them Raja Narayanlalji Lahoti, of his own family. What had begun as a single combined college of arts, commerce and science had become, by the time he took the chair, a group of institutions on twenty-two acres in the middle of the city.
A Lahoti helped found it. Two generations later, a Lahoti was asked to look after it.
Presiding over an inherited institution is a particular kind of work. The founder gets the credit and the foundation stone; the custodian gets accreditation cycles, governing-body minutes, appointments, buildings and the slow business of keeping standards from slipping. Four of the Society’s eight colleges — pharmacy, a second pharmacy institute, architecture and interior design — opened during his tenure, and its colleges today hold NAAC A+ grading.
Research & Service
His involvement runs past the boardroom. At Aavishkar, the research convention held under Swami Ramanand Teerth Marathwada University and hosted on the Dayanand campus, he has announced cash awards for first-prize winners across disciplines, and goes to the venue in person to encourage the students competing. The district round in 2025 drew three hundred entrants.
He is listed as a patron of the Dayanand College of Law’s national moot court competition, and contributes forewords to the academic volumes the Society’s colleges publish.
Outside education, he has served as honorary treasurer of the Latur district branch of the Indian Red Cross Society, taking part in a Youth Led Project orientation that brought together student volunteers, teachers and community representatives.
A pattern runs through all of it: institutions should not only pass knowledge on, but give the young something to do with it.
Continue
1961 to Today
The full history of the institution he leads, and the three generations of the family who built and kept it.
The Society →The Latur Branch
Raja Narayanlal Lahoti, Seth Bankatlal Lahoti, Seth Puranmal Lahoti and the rest of the Marathwada line.
The people →Since the 1860s
Where Latur’s institutions sit in the family’s hundred and sixty-five years in the Deccan.
The timeline →