India cuts TB deaths 38 percent since 2015

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India's health ministry announced this week that tuberculosis deaths have fallen 38 percent since 2015, a decline it says outpaces the global reduction of 35 percent over the same period. The figures come from the WHO Global Tuberculosis Report 2026, released on November 12, which estimates India's TB mortality at 18 per lakh population in 2025, down from 28 per lakh a decade earlier.

The ministry attributes the drop to the National TB Elimination Programme: proactive case-finding, AI-enabled portable X-rays, rapid molecular diagnostics and nutritional support through the Ni-kshay Poshan Yojana. The numbers behind the campaign are staggering in scale — since December 2024, more than 25 crore people have been brought under TB screening, over 11 crore chest X-rays conducted and 48.64 lakh new cases identified, of which nearly 15 lakh were asymptomatic. Treatment success for drug-susceptible TB stands at 94 percent, and 96 percent of the programme's budget comes from domestic rather than donor funds.

But the arithmetic rests on inputs the same state apparatus produces. The WHO mortality estimate draws on the Registrar General of India's Sample Registration System, community-based verbal autopsy assessments and programme data from the Ni-kshay portal — instruments administered by the same government celebrating the result. A nationally representative TB prevalence survey conducted by the Indian Council of Medical Research in 2025 has been shared with the WHO but remains under technical discussion, meaning an independent check on India's caseload is still pending. Case-detection campaigns that find millions of asymptomatic infections also complicate the baseline: better screening can lower measured mortality simply by moving deaths into counted categories.

None of which proves the decline is inflated. A country screening a quarter of a billion people, running AI chest X-rays at village level and paying for the programme itself has less reason to fake progress than one dependent on external donors. But the announcement's framing — India beating the global average — is a ministry interpreting its own ledgers, and the updated WHO country profile will be the first number in the story the ministry did not write.