TB Treatment Success Rate In India Now Stands At 90%: WHO’s Global Tuberculosis Report 2025
India’s gains show what is possible when political will, technology, and community converge. The global stagnation shows what happens when those forces falter.
Published : November 15, 2025 at 10:12 AM IST
There is a strange kind of déjà vu in the way global health conversations return to tuberculosis. It is the oldest story in the book of infectious disease: millions of people falling ill, governments promising action, researchers unveiling breakthroughs, and the world cautiously celebrating progress that never seems to go far enough. But each year, the numbers swirl back like an echo: TB remains one of humanity’s most persistent killers.
The WHO’s Global Tuberculosis Report 2025 makes this déjà vu official. More than 1.23 million people died of TB last year and 10.7 million fell ill. And yet, TB is both preventable and curable. That contradiction sits at the centre of the report. WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus calls this ongoing death toll “simply unconscionable”.
India’s Big Decline
One of the report’s most striking reveals comes from India, the country that bears 25% of the world’s TB burden. The numbers, at first glance, suggest a breakthrough. India’s TB incidence rate (new cases emerging each year) fell 21%, from 237 per lakh population in 2015 to 187 per lakh in 2024. To put that in perspective, the global decline during the same period was just 12%.
But what makes India’s progress compelling is not just the scale, it’s the strategy. India has reengineered how TB is found, tracked, and treated. Massive community mobilization efforts, aggressive case finding, rapid molecular testing, and decentralization of care have increased treatment coverage from 53% in 2015 to an impressive 92% in 2024. That means 26.18 lakh people were diagnosed and placed on treatment last year... nearly all of those estimated to have the disease.
Perhaps the most quietly revolutionary achievement is the reduction of “missing cases.” In 2015, an estimated 15 lakh Indians had TB but never entered the reporting system. In 2024, that number fell to under one lakh. In a disease where invisibility kills, visibility is life-saving.
Even multidrug-resistant TB (once the monster hiding within the epidemic) has not increased significantly. The treatment success rate in India now stands at 90%, edging past the global average of 88%. Yet India also illustrates a paradox. It leads the world in TB numbers not because it is failing, but because its surveillance is sharper than most nations’. High burden, in this case, is partly a reflection of high detection.
Progress That Isn’t Fast Enough
Across the world, the TB narrative is a series of small victories overshadowed by a looming deadline. Deaths fell from 1.27 million in 2023 to 1.23 million in 2024: a reduction of just 3%. The long-term decline from 2015 to 2024 is more encouraging at 29%, but still far behind the 75% reduction in deaths the End TB Strategy hoped to achieve by 2025. If TB were a student being graded on effort, the teacher might say: “Improving, but nowhere near the benchmark.”
Globally, 8.3 million new cases were diagnosed and reported in 2024, up from 8.2 million the year before. More people were tested with rapid molecular diagnostics (54%, up from 48%) and treatment success for drug-resistant TB climbed from 68% to 71%.
Why TB Persists
TB’s context is a minefield of inequities: undernutrition, poverty, HIV co-infection, diabetes, tobacco use, alcohol consumption, and the systemic inequalities that bind all these factors together. The 2025 report highlights a new frontier: social protection. For the first time, WHO tracked how well countries support people whose TB risk is linked to poverty and instability. Among the 30 high-burden countries, social protection coverage ranges from 3.1% in Uganda to 94% in Mongolia. Nineteen countries cover less than half their population. In such conditions, TB thrives not as a medical mystery but as a symptom of deeper societal fractures.
TB is not simply an infectious disease. It is, in many ways, a socioeconomic disease. What makes TB’s persistence even more confounding is the financial equation. TB efforts received US$5.9 billion in 2024—barely one-fourth of the US$22 billion needed annually by 2027. In the long arc of TB history, these developments matter. Since 2000, treatment interventions have saved an estimated 83 million lives. But the arc bends slowly.
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