People · The Hyderabad Branch
Industrialist and benefactor · Rai Saheb, and afterwards Rai Bahadur
He ran one of the largest textile mills in the Nizam’s dominion and was honoured twice by the administration of the day. Neither is why he is remembered. He is remembered because of a single clause in a will, written in 1956, that is still spending money on strangers today.
The Mills
Pannalal was a son of Seth Hiralal Lahoti, of the founding generation of the house of Dayaram Surajmal. The family firm — indigenous bankers, cotton merchants, oil millers and commission agents — had spent two generations financing agriculture and trade across the Nizam’s dominion.
Under Pannalal it moved from financing industry to running it. He served as Managing Director of the Mahboob Shahi Kulbarga Mills at Gulbarga, among the largest and earliest integrated textile mills in the dominion. The mill employed thousands and anchored the cotton economy of the region; for many years it was the economic lifeline of the town.
That is why the family’s deepest institutional roots are in Gulbarga rather than Hyderabad. The mills are the reason a Rajasthani trading family became a Deccan industrial one.
In recognition of his public works and his standing as a merchant, the administration of the day conferred on him the titles of Rai Saheb and afterwards Rai Bahadur — honours held for life, and given for conspicuous public service rather than wealth alone.
1956 · The Will
In 1956 he directed, by will, that one-fourth of his estate be set aside in perpetuity for hospitals and educational institutions across the former Hyderabad State.
The word that matters is perpetuity. This was not a donation, which is a decision made once. It was a standing instrument — a permanent claim on the family fortune that his descendants could not revisit, argue with, or quietly let lapse. He removed a quarter of what he owned from the reach of everyone who came after him, and pointed it at people he would never meet.
A title lapses with the man who holds it. A trust does not.
Seventy years later the Raisaheb Pannalal Hiralal Lahoti Trust is still working. It is named as the donor behind the Lahoti Eye Centre of the L V Prasad Eye Institute — a facility reopened at Kondapur in January 2026 by the Governor of Telangana, in a part of Hyderabad that did not exist when the will was written.
Of the three honours held across three generations of this family, his is the only one that is still, in a literal sense, doing something.
1956 · The Instrument
The founding charitable body of the family, and the source from which much of the institutional list descends.
The trust →Twenty Institutions
What the money went on, across five regions of the former Hyderabad State.
The institutions →1900s & 1956
Where the mills and the will sit in the family’s 165 years in the Deccan.
The timeline →A Note on the Record
Much of what is recorded here comes from the family’s own account. His dates of birth and death are not recorded in the family history, and the year in which the Rai Saheb and Rai Bahadur titles were conferred is not known — so no date is given for them here rather than an estimate.
The trust is different. Its existence, its name and its work are independently documented in the public statements of the L V Prasad Eye Institute and in press coverage of the eye centre it funds. That is an unusually durable form of evidence: the man is remembered chiefly through an instrument that other institutions still have to name in writing.
If records of the conferral, the mills, or the 1956 deed exist in family or institutional archives, they would materially strengthen this page — and this is the page on which they would matter most.
Continue
Seventeen Members
The founding generation before him, and the branches that came after.
The people →Three Generations
His titles, a seat in the first Rajya Sabha, and a French ministerial order — a century apart.
The honours →The Firm
The banking and trading house that carried the family from Rajasthan to the mills of Gulbarga.
The family story →