MPs to seek full central funding for TB control

An estimated 2.5 million people are living with TB in India with more than 2 million cases reported every year.

The Revised National TB Control Programme is run on shared funding between Centre and states.

Following Health Minister J P Nadda’s recent announcement about making the AIDS control programme a fully centrally-funded scheme, a group of former and present Parliamentarians are pushing for a similar status for the TB control programme.

“The health minister recently announced that the HIV programme will be fully centrally funded. We will push for similar status for the TB programme because TB is far more widespread. Each TB patient infects 70-80 people and the average cost of treating one patient is about 2.5 lakh. We are still charging duty on GeneExperts testing machines. That should be waived and TB drugs should be exempted from taxes,” said Kalikesh Narayan Singh Deo, MP from Bolangir in Odisha, who is in Cape Town to attend the 46th World Conference on Lung Health. Singh is a member of the advisory board of the Global Coalition Against TB with several others, including Jitin Prasada, Anurag Thakur, Oscar Fernandes, Tarun Vijay, Ashwani Kumar and Priya Dutt.

An estimated 2.5 million people are living with TB in India with more than 2 million cases reported every year.The Revised National TB Control Programme is run on shared funding between Centre and states. Health Ministry officials said a major problem was that states lack infrastructure and will to spend the funds available to them.

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“The government makes Rs 5 crore from taxes on GeneExpert, while it is spending Rs 500 crore on TB treatment. I will raise the matter with Finance Minister Arun Jaitley during the consultations for next year’s budget,” Deo, a member of the standing committee on finance, said. GeneExpert is a machine that uses a DNA probe (a DNA based prototype whose genetic composition is similar to that of a drug resistant bacterium), to analyse nature of the bacterium infecting a patient and also whether it is drug resistant. India did field trials for the machine in 2012 and has only now started procurement process for about 300.

Meanwhile, India is carrying out some pilot projects of public private partnership in TB care, some of which are being showcased at the meet. A year-old project of the Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai in association with private partner PATH seeks to provide free drugs to TB patients and also to cut down on emergence of drug resistant TB strains.

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