With many private doctors not notifying tuberculosis cases despite rules under the Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme to the Health Department, the State government issued a Government Order making it mandatory for all private doctors in India to report and notify every TB case.

Nearly 20 years after the Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme India (RNTCP) was implemented under guidelines from the World Health Organisation, there continues to be a disconnect between private practitioners and government initiatives.

The government is set to roll out the daily drug treatment for tuberculosis in Mumbai from September this year, replacing the three-times-a-week treatment schedule. The new treatment protocol for drug-sensitive cases — the regular TB cases that react to first line drugs — will be rolled out in five states including Maharashtra. The new protocol will eventually help bring down relapse rates, and in turn the number of drug-resistant TB cases.

India is unlikely to reach the WHO target of elimination of tuberculosis (TB) by 2050 going by the rate at which incidence of the disease is declining in the country.

India had an estimated 63,000 cases of notified multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (MDR-TB) in 2010, the highest in the South East Asia region, the World Health Organisation (WHO) has said.