A World Health Organisation (WHO) report has estimated that India’s tuberculosis (TB) incidence was two times higher and TB death rates three times higher in 2023 than the milestone targets set by the Narendra Modi government seven years ago to achieve “TB elimination” by 2025.

The WHO’s Global TB Report 2024 has estimated that India’s TB incidence was 195 per 100,000 people in 2023. The Union health ministry’s TB elimination plan unveiled in 2017 had set multiple milestones, including reducing TB incidence from 217 per 100,000 in 2015 to 77 per 100,000 in 2023.

The WHO report’s country profile section has also estimated that India’s TB death rate in 2023 was 22 per 100,000 population, or more than three times the country’s elimination milestone target to lower to 6 per 100,000 by 2023 from 32 per 100,000 in 2015.

The WHO’s “End TB Strategy” had set 2025 milestones of a 50 per cent reduction in TB incidence rate and a 75 per cent reduction in the number of TB deaths compared with 2015. Between 2015 and 2023, India’s incidence reduced by 18 per cent and death rates
by 24 per cent.

Experts familiar with India’s efforts to control TB view the latest Global TB Report as a fresh reminder of the distance of India’s TB incidence and death rates from its 2025 elimination goals — an incidence of 44 per 100,000 and a death rate below 3 per 100,000.

A public health expert who had attended a high-level summit in New Delhi on March 13, 2018, where India had launched its “TB free India campaign” to achieve elimination by 2025, had told The Telegraph that elimination by 2025 was “very unlikely”. But, the expert had said, the global health community was enthused about the campaign because it signalled a strong political commitment to TB elimination.

The WHO said around 8.2 million people were newly diagnosed with TB in 2023, the highest number recorded since the health agency began global TB monitoring in 1995 and a substantial increase of over around 7.5 million in 2022.

India accounts for 26 per cent of the global TB burden, followed by Indonesia (10 per cent), China (6.8 per cent), the Philippines (6.8 per cent) and Pakistan (6.3 per cent). The total number of TB-related deaths decreased from 1.32 million in 2022 to 1.25 million in 2023, according to the report.

“The fact that TB still kills and sickens so many people is an outrage, when we have tools to prevent it, detect it, and treat it,” WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said in a statement released with the report. “WHO urges all countries to make good on the concrete commitments they have made to expand the use of those tools.”

The Indian government has taken multiple initiatives — introduction of new anti-TB medicines, expanding diagnostic facilities and financial support for the nutrition of
TB patients — to accelerate progress towards its elimination goals.