People · The Latur Branch
Latur, Marathwada · Freedom fighter, Member of Parliament, patron of technical education
He is recorded on the rolls of Parliament as a freedom fighter, and he died in his seat in the first Rajya Sabha on 11 February 1954. In the same year he had set out, with two others, to give Latur an engineering school. He did not live to see it open. Eight years later his trustees handed it to the Government of Maharashtra, on one condition — that it keep his name. It still does.
1954 · Latur
Marathwada in the early 1950s had almost no technical training of its own. A boy from Latur who wanted to become an engineer had to leave.
In 1954 three men set out to change that: Swami Ramanand Teerth, the freedom fighter and educationist who had led the Hyderabad State Congress in the struggle against the Nizam’s rule; Devisinhji Chavan; and Seth Puranmal Lahoti. Two veterans of the same struggle, and a merchant who had just spent two years in the Republic’s first Parliament.
It was the last year of his life. He died on 11 February 1954, and the institute’s own history records him from the outset as the late Puranmal Lahoti. Whether he lived to see the first plans drawn is not recorded; what is certain is that he did not live to see a student walk through the door.
Land was donated by Mr Kayamkhani. Buildings and equipment were paid for by donations collected from the community. It opened with one course — “Overseer”, in civil engineering — and later added mechanical.
Then it outgrew them. The trust’s directors concluded they could not expand it further, and resolved to hand it to the Government of Maharashtra: buildings, assets and staff, entire. They attached a single condition — that the name of the late Puranmal Lahoti be kept at the beginning. The Government agreed, and took it over on 1 December 1962.
They gave away everything they had built, and asked only that a man’s name stay on the gate.
It is still there. 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 teaches around six hundred students a year.
3 April 1952 · The Council of States
On 3 April 1952 the Council of States was constituted for the first time. Hyderabad State, then a Part B state of the new Republic, held eleven of its seats. One of them was taken by Puranmal S. Lahoti, on the Indian National Congress benches.
The official register of former members carries one further detail the family’s own account had not recorded. Against his name, under the heading kept for those who took part in the struggle for independence, the entry reads simply: Freedom Fighter — Yes.
In one generation the house moved from titles conferred by the old administration to a seat held in the Republic’s own Parliament — by a man Parliament recorded as having helped bring it about.
He never left it. His term is recorded as ending on 11 February 1954 — the day he died. The rest of his class sat on until 2 April, when the staggered first third of the new House retired together. He was gone seven weeks before them.
He served one term, and it ended with his life.
The two records agree without knowing of each other. The family kept the date; the Secretariat closed the seat. That they fall on the same day is the strongest single piece of corroboration on this page.
A Note on the Record
The parliamentary service is a matter of public record. The entry appears in the register of former members maintained by the Rajya Sabha Secretariat — Former Members of Rajya Sabha since 1952, as on 30 November 2017, published on the Government of India’s Open Government Data platform. It gives the name as Shri Puranmal S. Lahoti, the state as Hyderabad, the party as Indian National Congress, the term as 3 April 1952 to 11 February 1954, and records him as a freedom fighter.
The founding of the Latur institute is documented by the institution itself. Its own history names him with Swami Ramanand Teerth and Devisinhji Chavan, and records the 1962 handover and the condition attached to it.
His death is recorded by the family as 11 February 1954, and the register independently closes his term on that date while his whole class continued to 2 April. The two sources were compiled separately and agree exactly, which is about as firm as a date from this period gets.
Still unrecorded: his year of birth, and whether he took part in the first discussions of the Latur institute in the weeks before he died or whether the others carried it forward in his name. The institute’s history dates the decision to 1954 and calls him the late Puranmal Lahoti; it does not resolve the order of events. Neither does this page, rather than guess at it.
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Seventeen Members
The Latur branch, and the Gulbarga and Hyderabad lines alongside it.
The people →Three Generations
Where a held seat sits between a conferred title and a foreign order.
The honours →1952 & 1962
The densest decade on the family line, and why the 1956 will sits in the middle of it.
The timeline →