In August this year, I visited the chock-o-block clinic at JJ Hospital in Mumbai. As I was sitting in the clinic, a 30-year-old woman was the second patient that day to be diagnosed with female genital tuberculosis—a form of extra-pulmonary tuberculosis that is always secondary to tuberculosis infection elsewhere in the body. It had been less than an hour since the clinic had opened at about 11 am. The woman, desperate to bear a child, joked with the resident doctor examining her, “I will come one day and pick up some child from the hospital. You mark my words.” I found out later that she had been married for about 14 years.

One of Asia’s largest facility for treating tuberculosis, the 1,200-bed hospital in central Mumbai’s Sewri area, is a relic of the British Raj. It has high ceilings and open corridors, it is airy and quite unlike other public hospitals which are teeming with people all the time. It has nine wards, only three of which are dedicated to women. There is usually an eerie quietness in these wards, even during visiting hours, as many women patients do not get visitors for weeks on end.

The National Tuberculosis Institute (NTI) at Bangalore has confirmed that all eight patients whose sputum samples for a re-test have show resistance to all the known TB drugs (first and second line). The confirmation report by institute was sent to the Delhi-based Central TB Division (CTD) on April 19, which was sent to the state health department on Monday.