Like South Africa, India should immediately make available the tuberculosis (TB) drug bedaquiline – till now used as a drug of last resort – to nearly 147,000 Indians with a multidrug-resistant version of the disease, a leading South African TB-HIV researcher told IndiaSpend.

India has over 850,000 private pharmacies or chemists nationwide; yet, only 9% of them – not enough to have a larger public-health impact – have been engaged in efforts to control TB.