People · Hyderabad · Trusteeship
Managing Trustee, Rai Saheb Pannalal Hiralal Lahoti Charitable Trust
Nobody writes a biography of a trustee. The work is meetings, accounts and decisions taken quietly over decades — and its only measure is that things kept happening. A charitable instruction written in 1956 is still funding eye care and education in Hyderabad, and that is largely his doing.
Stewardship
In 1956 Rai Saheb Pannalal Hiralal Lahoti directed by will that a quarter of his estate be set aside in perpetuity for hospitals and educational institutions. It was a single decision, and a famous one within the family.
Sureshchandra Pannalal Lahoti, son and successor in that line, has spent his working life on everything that came afterwards. He is Chairman Trustee of the charitable trust bearing the founder’s name — more recently described as Managing Trustee — and under his stewardship its work has run across healthcare, education, fellowships, and the promotion of art and culture in the former Hyderabad State.
A founder makes one decision. A custodian makes a hundred, and the instrument survives because of those rather than the first.
A trust does not run itself. Somebody has to decide which of the year’s applications to fund and which to turn down; whether to give a little to many or a great deal to one; whether a request that fits the letter of a seventy-year-old instruction also fits its spirit. None of that leaves a record beyond the institutions it produces.
His contribution is best read not as a donation but as continuity — inherited resources placed, year after year, in the service of institutions that belong to the wider community rather than to the family.
2021 · The Visible Half
The clearest public expression of that stewardship carries the family name. In 2021 the L V Prasad Eye Institute named its upgraded city centre the Lahoti Eye Centre, in acknowledgement of support from the family trust — which LVPEI describes as a trust established by the family of Suresh Chandra Lahoti.
The choice of partner is itself a judgement worth noticing. LVPEI provides more than half its services free of charge, regardless of the complexity of the case or the patient’s ability to pay. Funding capacity inside a network of that kind reaches further, and faster, than a new building with a family name over the door would have done.
The trust did not build a hospital. It made one that already worked available to more people.
The centre gives comprehensive outpatient and diagnostic care and refers patients needing advanced treatment into LVPEI’s major Hyderabad institute, so that care continues without a break. In early 2026 it moved from Madhapur into a larger facility at Kondapur, extending its reach across the western side of the city.
Medicine
Seven specialist departments at Kondapur, within one of the most respected eye-care networks in the world.
The eye centre →1956 · 1974
A quarter of an estate, directed by will and constituted by deed — the instrument he administers.
The trust →The Founder
The mills, the titles, and the will that outlasted both.
The profile →The Other Half
The 1956 will named two fields, and the second is education. He serves as Joint Secretary of Hindi Mahavidyalaya at Nallakunta in Hyderabad, and sits on its Governing Council.
Founded in 1961, the college occupies an unusual position. It teaches degree programmes in the arts, sciences, commerce and management through Hindi — one of very few institutions in southern India to do so.
For a Hindi-speaking family in a Telugu- and Urdu-speaking city, a Hindi-medium college is not an abstraction. It is how a community keeps its children in education without asking them to change language first.
That is a particular kind of institution to support: not glamorous, not large, and answering a need most of the city does not have. It fits a pattern this family has followed for a century — the law college for a region with no legal education, the polytechnic for a town with no engineers, the eye centre for a suburb with no eye hospital.
Find the gap, fund the institution that fills it, and let somebody else run it.
Continue
Generation by Generation
The Hyderabad line, and the Gulbarga and Latur branches alongside it.
The people →1956 · 2003 · 2017
The three instruments of giving the family has built, and what each continues to fund.
The trusts →1860s to Today
Where this generation of stewardship sits in a hundred and sixty-five years in the Deccan.
The timeline →