In March 2016, in his Mann Ki Baat address, Prime Minister Narendra Modi urged people to make India TB-free; in 2018 he set the target to “eliminate TB by 2025”. To fulfil this goal, the Health Ministry rolled out the National Strategic Plan (NSP) 2017-2025 to “eliminate” TB by 2025. Though the Plan outlined a paradigm shift in approach and strategy to achieve the ambitious goal, by 2020, it became clear that the NSP will not be able to meet these objectives. A new National Strategic Plan 2020-2025 to end TB was launched.
On the diagnostics front, NSP 2017-2025 wanted to reduce the number of presumptive TB patients who are offered sputum smear microscopy from over 9.1 million in 2015 to 5.8 million in 2022, while increasing the number of molecular tests from 40,000 in 2015 to over 13.4 million in 2022. As per the India TB report, in 2022, India was far from reaching the ambitious target set by the NSP 2017-2025 — smear microscopy was used for detecting 77% (13.9 million) of presumptive TB cases and just 23% (4.1 million) cases were detected using a molecular test.
If India failed to meet the diagnostic goals set out by NSP 2017-2025, the revised National Strategic Plan 2020-2025 has raised the bar even higher for precision tests to be used for initial diagnosis. Three years after the launch of the revised NSP, India is nowhere near meeting this target.
