“Elimination of tuberculosis by 2025 is also targeted,” finance minister Arun Jaitley said during his February 1, 2017, budget speech as he spoke about eliminating Kala-Azar (black fever or Visceral leishmaniasis) and filariasis by 2017, leprosy by 2018 and measles by 2020.

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.

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.