India's TB Elimination Progress: Gains and Challenges
New Delhi | November 18, 2025 - As India continues its ambitious journey toward tuberculosis elimination by 2025, recent data reveals a complex landscape of significant progress tempered by persistent structural challenges. The Global TB Report 2025 indicates that while treatment coverage has improved remarkably, the nation remains far from achieving its elimination target.
India recorded approximately 27.1 lakh tuberculosis cases and over three lakh deaths in 2024, maintaining its position as one of the top contributors to global TB statistics. The bacterial infection continues to be the deadliest infectious killer worldwide, having infected 10.7 million people and claimed 1.23 million lives globally last year.
Treatment Success Versus Elimination Reality
The Union Health Ministry highlights a significant achievement in treatment coverage, which surged to 92% in 2024 from just 53% in 2015. This improvement stems from innovative case-finding approaches, rapid adoption of new technologies, service decentralization, and extensive community mobilization efforts.
India diagnosed a record 26.18 lakh cases in 2024, substantially narrowing the gap between estimated and actually diagnosed cases. The country was among eight high-burden nations that successfully diagnosed more than 80% of estimated cases last year.
However, the elimination target - defined as less than one case per million population - remains distant. The WHO End TB strategy aims for an 80% decline in new TB cases and 90% reduction in TB deaths by 2030 compared to 2015 baseline figures. India has achieved only a 21% reduction in new cases and 28% reduction in deaths between 2015 and 2024, falling significantly short of the 2025 milestones of 50% reduction in incidence and 75% reduction in mortality.
Drug-Resistant TB and Comorbidities
India continues to bear a substantial burden of drug-resistant tuberculosis, accounting for nearly one-third of global cases. In 2024, 12.63% of previously treated TB patients and 3.64% of new cases showed drug resistance, translating to approximately 1.27 lakh people with drug-resistant TB.
Emerging health challenges complicate the TB landscape further. Pollution and rising diabetes prevalence increase TB risk, with an estimated 3.2 lakh TB cases attributable to diabetes in 2024 alone. The expansion of treatment coverage has been facilitated by initiatives like the BPaL regimen, which reduced treatment duration for resistant infections from 18-24 months to just six months.
RBI's Export Relief Measures: Balancing Support and Financial Stability
In response to trade tensions with the United States, which imposed elevated tariffs of 50% on Indian shipments, the Reserve Bank of India announced comprehensive relief measures for affected exporters. These interventions aim to mitigate debt repayment pressures while raising important risk-management considerations for financial institutions.
Key Relief Measures and Implementation
The RBI's relief package includes a four-month moratorium on loans and interest payments from September 1 to December 31, 2025. Regulated entities - including commercial banks, NBFCs, and all-India financial institutions - must grant moratorium or deferment on term loan payments and interest recovery on working capital loans during this period.
Export credit tenure has been extended from 270 days to 450 days for pre-shipment and post-shipment credit disbursed until March 31, 2026. The central bank also relaxed asset classification norms by excluding the moratorium period from days-past-due calculations under applicable Income Recognition, Asset Classification and Provisioning norms.
Banks must maintain a general provision of 5% against accounts that were in default but classified as standard as of August 31, 2025, where trade relief measures have been extended. The RBI also amended FEMA regulations, extending the time limit for realization and repatriation of export proceeds from nine to fifteen months.
Risk Management Considerations
While these measures provide crucial liquidity support to exporters facing cash flow disruptions from delayed orders and payments, they present significant risk-management challenges for financial institutions. The moratorium period and relaxed classification norms could potentially mask underlying asset quality issues, requiring vigilant monitoring by banks.
The relief measures target specific sectors including organic chemicals, plastics, rubber, leather, carpets, apparel, footwear, iron and steel articles, nuclear reactors, electrical machinery, aluminum, and furniture. These sectors have been particularly affected by recent trade disruptions and elevated tariffs.
The RBI's interventions, coupled with the government's Export Promotion Mission featuring a Rs 25,060 crore outlay, are designed to ensure business continuity for viable enterprises while safeguarding financial stability. Regulated entities must balance support for genuine exporters with prudent risk assessment to maintain overall financial system health.
UPSC Mains Preparation Strategy
For civil services aspirants, these developments present crucial study material for General Studies Paper 3, covering topics from health management to economic policy. Answer writing practice should incorporate recent data, government initiatives, and critical analysis of policy effectiveness.
Successful answers should structure arguments with clear introductions, well-organized body content mixing points and short paragraphs, and forward-looking conclusions. Underlining key terms and using diagrams where appropriate can enhance presentation and scoring potential.
Self-evaluation remains essential, with aspirants encouraged to assess their understanding of both the progress made and challenges remaining in India's TB elimination journey, as well as the nuanced balance between export support and financial risk management in RBI's policy measures.
