Sangeeta* has tuberculosis and has been on medication for more than a year. Recently, the government treatment provider who supplies her the medicines asked for her Aadhaar number and bank account number, which he said were needed to access compensation that the government is planning to give tuberculosis patients. Sangeeta has neither.

Fifty-year-old James is all skin and bones and can barely speak coherently. He has been an injecting drug user, or IDU, for more than 30 years. In July this year, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis – a diagnosis that was made during an exercise conducted by Delhi health authorities to find tuberculosis among injecting drugs users.

India’s tuberculosis control programme is not fully equipped to prevent, diagnose, and treat patients. The Revised National Tuberculosis Control Program uses outdated diagnostic techniques, suffers from repeated medicine stock-outs and lacks capacity to counsel tuberculosis patients, according to the Out of Step report released by the Stop TB Partnership and Médecins Sans Frontières last week.

The government has made Aadhaar compulsory for tuberculosis patients and health providers seeking cash assistance under the Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme. The nationwide programme is administered online through a web-based application called Nikshay. All government and private healthcare providers are supposed to register TB patients using Nikshay.

Early this year 25-year-old Abhi* went to a private clinic to get treatment for a lump near her neck that was hurting. The doctor told to go to the municipal clinic. Abhi works as a sex worker in the Delhi’s GB Road red light area.

In his budget speech on Wednesday (February 1), Finance Minister Arun Jaitley announced the government’s intention to eliminate five chronic diseases that affect poor people. “Government has therefore prepared an action plan to eliminate kala azar and filariasis by 2017, leprosy by 2018 and measles by 2020,” he said. “Elimination of tuberculosis by 2025 is also targeted.”

An unreasonable domicile requirement that was responsible for denying the life-saving bedaquiline drug to many patients suffering from drug-resistant tuberculosis may no longer apply.

A year after announcing a supplementary nutrition programme, TB patients are slowly gaining weight and health. This could improve treatment outcomes.

The launch in India of Genedrive – a diagnostic product to detect drug-resistant tuberculosis developed by British firm Epistem – has been questioned by medical experts, including the Indian Council for Medical Research. They have cited a study that claims that the test has poor accuracy.

On 25 June 2015, Sulabha Kadam, a health worker in Mumbai who works with the Navnirman Samaj Vikas Kendra (NSVK) —a non-governmental organisation that works with the state government to provide access to medical treatment in slums—hiked up a hillock to the house of a 35-year-old woman who was suspected of having tuberculosis. She was told that no one in the house was sick. Twenty days later, when Kadam stopped by the house as part of a regular follow-up, she found the woman lying on a cot unable to move. Kadam had the woman’s sputum checked. She tested positive for tuberculosis.