Dr Mathura Prasad Shrestha, a renowned civil rights activist and former health minister who for his long-spanning service in the public health sector earned the epithet ‘guru of gurus’, died on Monday at the Annapurna Neuro Hospital in Maitighar, Kathmandu. He was 88.

Shrestha breathed his last at 4:15 am on Monday at the hospital, where he was undergoing treatment for respiratory complications for the past few days, the hospital administration said.

Dr Shrestha was born at Bandipur in Tanahu and brought up in Chitwan, where his family had migrated few years after he was born, according to Thaleshwor Dawadi, a childhood friend of Dr Shrestha.

Dr Shrestha completed his primary education in Bandipur and his intermediate schooling in Kathmandu. For his medical study, he went to India.

Dr Shrestha has been widely acclaimed as a torchbearer of Nepal’s public health sector, with some of his acquaintances dubbing him a ‘guru of gurus’.

Shyam Shrestha, a political analyst who worked closely with Dr Shrestha, remembers him as a professor and the propagator of community medicine. “He contributed to formulating a medical study curriculum and played a crucial role in the establishment of the Institute of Medicine,” Shrestha said. “He advocated that community-level primary care would be suitable for countries like Nepal.”

Shrestha played an important role in the first People’s Movement of 1990. He then served as the founding vice-president of the Human Rights Protection Forum. In April 1990, he was appointed the health minister in the Nepali Congress leader Krishna Prasad Bhattarai’s interim cabinet. Another prominent human rights activist Devendra Raj Panday was also included in the cabinet as the finance minister.

“He actively advocated for the country’s public health service, human rights and civil rights,” Shrestha, the political analyst, said.

Dr Shrestha was one among the three people to appeal to the public for the second people’s movement, which followed King Gyanendra Shah’s coup on February 1, 2005. “Citizens Movement for Democracy and Peace (CMDP) of 2006 had three leading figures—Dr Shrestha, Panday and myself,” said Krishna Pahadi, a human rights activist.

Prime Minister Pushpa Kamal Dahal along with former prime minister and UML Chairman KP Sharma Oli and Deputy Prime Minister and Finance Minister Bishnu Paudel have expressed their condolences on Dr Shrestha’s demise.

Dr Shrestha is survived by six sons from his two wives, both of whom are dead.

Dr Krishna Prasad Adhikary, registrar of the Nepal Medical Council, said Dr Shrestha’s dead body has been kept at the Maharajgunj-based TU Teaching Hospital. His funeral rites will be performed on Tuesday morning at 11 am.