Saurabh RamBihariLal Shrivastava, Prateek Saurabh Shrivastava and Jegadeesh Ramasamy
Globally it has been estimated that in the year 2012, almost 8.6 million people developed tuberculosis and approximately 1.3 million succumbed to death owing to the development of complications. The contribution of India towards the global burden of TB is immensely large – 26% of worldwide cases and also accounting for highest number of Multi-Drug Resistant (MDR) TB cases. These estimates clearly reflect that the concerted efforts of India’s program managers / stakeholders under the Revised National TB Control Program (RNTCP) to achieve Millennium Development Goal - 6 by 2015 have not delivered favorable results. Realizing the global public health concerns, World Health Organization (WHO) has identified five priority areas to accelerate the progress towards 2015 targets namely reaching the missed cases, addressing MDR-TB; accelerating the response to TB/HIV, augmenting financial support, and timely adoption of innovations in the program. To conclude, although off-late RNTCP has initiated multiple strategies to combat TB, these can become fruitful only when they are successfully implemented at the grass root level.