Indian Health Planning Committees — Context

Possible Explanations

1. Spelling variation: You may be referring to a lesser-known or regional-level committee with a phonetically similar name (e.g., Mudaliar is sometimes colloquially mispronounced/written as "Murlidhar").
2. State-level committee: It could be a state government or sub-national committee not in national databases.
3. Non-health domain: There is a Justice Murli Dhar (Delhi High Court judge) involved in legal committees, which would be unrelated to health.
4. Very recent committee: A post-2023 committee that may not yet be widely documented.

Mudaliar Committee (1962)

Background / Why It Was Formed

• The Bhore Committee (1946) had made comprehensive recommendations for India's health system.
• By the end of the 2nd Five Year Plan (1956–61), over 10 years had passed since Bhore's report.
• New guidelines were needed to assess progress and plan for further development within the Five Year Plan framework.
• The Government of India appointed this committee to review what had changed and chart the way forward.

Key Findings

• Quality of healthcare at Primary Health Centres (PHCs) was unsatisfactory.
• Existing PHCs needed to be strengthened before new ones were opened.
• Sub-divisional and district hospitals needed reinforcement to function as effective referral centres.
• Spending on health had declined from 5.9% (1st Five Year Plan) to 4.25% (3rd Five Year Plan) of the total budget.
• Bed-population ratio was only 0.4 per 1,000 population.
• Life expectancy at birth was approximately 42 years.
• There were 61 medical colleges, against the 43 proposed by Bhore — a relative increase, but quality concerns remained.

Main Recommendations

Significance

• The Mudaliar Committee is considered the second major health survey committee of independent India, after Bhore.
• Its emphasis on quality over quantity (strengthen before expanding) was a major policy shift.
• The recommendation for an All India Health Service was a notable but never fully implemented proposal.
• It laid the groundwork for subsequent committees (Mukherjee, Jungalwalla, Kartar Singh) that focused on multipurpose workers and integrated health services.

Shrivastava Committee (1975)

Background / Why It Was Formed

• (a) Reorient medical education in line with national needs and priorities
• (b) Suggest improvements to existing medical educational processes with emphasis on problems relevant to national requirements
• (c) Make any other suggestions to realise the above objectives

Key Findings / Problem Identified

• Acute dearth of trained health manpower in rural areas
• Doctors produced by medical colleges were not oriented toward community/primary health care
• The rural population lacked access to even simple promotive, preventive, and curative services
• The gap between professional doctors at PHCs and the community was too large — there was no intermediate cadre

Major Recommendations

Significance

• The Shrivastava Committee is most remembered for introducing the concept of the Community Health Worker (CHW) in India — village-based, semi-trained individuals drawn from the community.
• This concept directly inspired the Community Health Volunteer (CHV) scheme and later evolved into the ASHA (Accredited Social Health Activist) worker under the National Rural Health Mission (2005).
• It was a landmark shift from a doctor-centric to a community-centric model of primary health care.
• Aligned philosophically with the Alma-Ata Declaration (1978) on Primary Health Care — "Health for All."