A. Dyalchand

Dyalchand trained as a doctor and is an ophthalmologist by education.

IHMP dates its beginnings to 1976, when a young medical graduate began working from a five-bed hospital at Pachod, a village in Aurangabad district of Maharashtra that had been badly affected by famine. Two years later a team of two doctors, a nutritionist and a demographer was formed and began a comprehensive health and development project across 52 villages with a population of about 60,000.

IHMP pioneered the training of traditional birth attendants, known as dais, and was the first organisation in India to run a maternal and neonatal health programme through them, an approach later taken up nationally. Its work has covered maternal and neonatal health, malnutrition, sanitation, communicable and non-communicable diseases, reproductive and child health services, life-skills education for adolescent girls and gender sensitisation among boys and young men, in villages and in urban slums.

In 1986 IHMP opened a training centre offering practical skills in public health, and by 1990 it had become a nationally and internationally recognised training centre; more than 10,000 health workers from Indian non-profit and government bodies and from South Asian and African countries have trained there. The institute extended its work to Pune in 1996, developing public health models for urban slums, and in 2005 was invited by the Government of India to sit on the task force formulating the National Urban Health Mission policy.

From 1998 IHMP began working directly with adolescent girls, developing a life-skills programme intended to delay the age of marriage, and from 2003 with married adolescent girls and their husbands. The institute has run girls' clubs, in which unmarried girls receive life-skills education, and boys' clubs, in which boys and young men learn about child marriage, girls' rights and gender equality. IHMP reports that in the area where it works the average age at which girls are married has risen from 14 to 17.

In 2019 Dyalchand was chosen by children voting worldwide as the World's Children's Prize Child Rights Hero of the Year, an award presented by the World's Children's Prize Foundation of Sweden and often described in the media as the children's Nobel prize, in recognition of his work for the rights of the girl child.[2][3][4][5]