NEW DELHI — Finally coming to terms with the enormity of its tuberculosis problem, India is preparing a radical overhaul and expansion of its national treatment program to fight an affliction that kills more adults worldwide than any other infectious disease.

Red tape and over-regulation can kill.

Confronting a slowing economy and a large budget deficit, India has significantly reduced its planned expenditure on fighting tuberculosis, the airborne disease that kills more adults here than any other infection and has become increasingly more drug resistant, a review of government plans and budgets shows.

NEW DELHI—An international health initiative has brokered a landmark accord that aims to halve the price patients pay for advanced tests for a strain of tuberculosis that is resistant to standard drugs.

MUMBAI—Here on center stage in the global crisis of drug-resistant tuberculosis, top doctors are sounding a new alarm: India's emergency strategy to defeat the disease may be having the opposite effect—encouraging TB instead to mutate into more deadly and unstoppable strains.

Rahima Sheikh, an Indian tuberculosis patient carrying a nearly untreatable strain of the disease, is perilously close to running out of the medicines that appear to be saving her life.

MUMBAI—As dawn broke on July 16, a tiny woman pushed a metal trunk aboard a train, pausing a moment to cough into the green-and-black-print scarf around her head. Her husband carried a comically large water jug.

MUMBAI—India's slow response to years of medical warnings now threatens to turn the country into an incubator for a mutant strain of tuberculosis that is proving resistant to all known treatments, raising alarms of a new global health hazard.