Institutions · Latur
Ausa Road, Latur · Begun 1954, handed to the State in 1962
Among Maharashtra’s oldest institutes of technology, and the institution that gave Marathwada its first generations of diploma engineers. The family did something unusual with it: having built it, they gave the whole thing away to the Government of Maharashtra — on a single condition.
The Lahoti Contribution
In 1954 three men decided that Latur needed a technical institute: Swami Ramanand Teerth, the freedom fighter and educationist who had led the Hyderabad State Congress; Devisinhji Chavan; and Seth Puranmal Lahoti, who two years earlier had taken his seat in the first Rajya Sabha of the Republic.
The land was donated by Mr Kayamkhani. The buildings and equipment were paid for by donations collected from the community. It opened with a single course — “Overseer”, in civil engineering — and later added mechanical.
Then it outgrew its founders. The trust’s directors concluded they could not expand it further, and passed a resolution to hand the institute over to the Government of Maharashtra: the buildings, the assets and the staff, entire. They attached one condition.
That the name of the late Puranmal Lahoti be kept at the beginning. The Government agreed, and on 1 December 1962 took it over as the Puranmal Lahoti Government Polytechnic.
It is the clearest example on this list of how the family understood philanthropy. They did not want the institute; they wanted it to survive and grow, which meant giving it to someone with deeper pockets than their own. What they kept was the name — and only because a name on a gate is how a place remembers who built it.
The Sequence
Directories give the founding year variously as 1954, 1956, 1958 and 1962, and all four are defensible — they simply record different moments. The sequence:
1954
Swami Ramanand Teerth, Devisinhji Chavan and Puranmal Lahoti resolve to start a technical institute at Latur. Land is donated; funds are collected.
1956–58
A one-year diploma opens, then the “Overseer” course in civil engineering, and afterwards mechanical. The institute is formally established.
1 December 1962
The Government of Maharashtra takes over the institute, its assets and its staff, and renames it for Puranmal Lahoti as the trust had required.
In 1988 the institute was ranked first at national level in a survey by the National Institute of Technical Teachers’ Training and Research, Bhopal. It has since been renamed the Puranmal Lahoti Government Institute of Engineering & Technology, and teaches civil, mechanical, electrical, electronics, computer engineering and information technology to around six hundred students a year.
Continue
Twenty Institutions
Every institution the family endowed across five regions of the former Hyderabad State.
All institutions →1952
Puranmal Lahoti took his seat two years before deciding Latur needed an engineering school.
The honours →1962
Where the polytechnic sits in the family’s 165 years in the Deccan.
The timeline →