PM's remarks at the flagging off of the first train from Mendipathar, Meghalaya to Guwahati

India’s health system is undergoing a stable and decisive transformation under Prime Minister Narendra Modi. For decades, the system was built largely around treatment after illness had already advanced.
Today, it is increasingly structured around prevention, early detection, and timely intervention. This shift matters because India’s heaviest disease burden such as Tuberculiosis, anaemia and other communicable and non communicable diseases , has always fallen on those least able to absorb it, that is, the poor, the undernourished, and those who reach care too late.
Through large-scale screening programmes, nutrition support, and more accessible treatment pathways, the government is ensuring that the disease is detected earlier, treated sooner, and prevented from becoming a greater social and economic burden.

Holistic approach to TB

In 2014, India accounted for more TB cases and deaths than any other country in the world, with an incidence rate of 237 per lakh, with an estimated 15 lakh patients missing entirely from the system. By 2024, that rate had fallen to 187 per lakh.
According to the WHO’s Global Tuberculosis Report 2025, this represents a 21% decline, the steepest among high-burden countries, and nearly double the global average reduction of 12%, with treatment coverage rising from 53% to 92% in the same decade.
What drove this was not only better medicines but mass detection. Under TB Mukt Bharat Abhiyan (2024), 20 crore people were screened, 28 lakh active TB patients were identified, and 9 lakh asymptomatic cases were found who were carrying the disease without knowing it, undetected and untreated. The act of finding them was itself a public health intervention.
This identification led to a better intervention. The BPaLM regimen further reduced drug-resistant TB treatment from 20 months to 6 months, with treatment success rates among MDR-TB patients reaching 87%, as documented in a 2025 Science Direct study on India’s TB Elimination Programme.
Yet the clinical evidence is emphatic about one point: medicines alone are not sufficient. A 2025 study published in PLOS Global Public Health by Cornell University found that TB patients carry a “metabolic scar” with disrupted metabolic patterns persisting after the infection clears and that nutritional care must be integral to TB management, not supplementary.
Under PM Modi’s initiative, Ni-Kshay Poshan Yojana operationalises this challenge directly. The government doubled the monthly nutritional support for TB patients from Rs. 500 to Rs. 1,000, disbursing nearly Rs. 4,500 crores to 1.38 crore patients through Direct Benefit Transfer since 2018.
These interventions resulted in over 46 thousand Gram Panchayats being certified TB-free, a community-level confirmation that a combined medical and nutritional approach is producing results beyond facility walls.

Anaemia

Anaemia presents a different scale of burden. NFHS-5 (2019-21) data show that 57% of women aged 15-49, 67% of children under five, 52.2% of pregnant women, and 59.1% of adolescent girls are anaemic.
Its consequences extend far beyond fatigue, presenting as developmental impairment in children, poor pregnancy outcomes, and long-term reductions in cognitive and physical productivity, which are all well-documented downstream effects.
To address this disease burden, the PM Modi government started the Anaemia Mukt Bharat (AMB) programme, which includes deworming and iron-folic acid (IFA) supplements as interventions. And under Pradhan Mantri Poshan Shakti Nirman, fortified rice has been mandated through the PDS, midday meal programmes, and ICDS.
This has shown a profound impact on anaemia reduction. A landmark study published in The Lancet Global Health, conducted across India, found that IFA supplementation cured approximately 85% of children with mild anaemia and 75% with moderate anaemia within 90 days, making combined IFA the most efficient single intervention for India’s profile.
Adding rice fortification addresses what supplementation programmes alone cannot reach, where populations that will not consistently attend health facilities.
A 2024 GiveWell meta-analysis in India, drawing on six controlled trials, found that iron-fortified rice reduced the prevalence of anaemia by 29%.
Together, these measures have shown that sustained intervention against anaemia, focusing on prevention, nutrition, and delivery systems that reach people before the condition becomes severe.

Screening: Prevention as Policy

Non-communicable diseases (NCD) share TB and anaemia’s central problem: they cause the most harm before producing symptoms. In 2025, the Ministry of Health launched an Intensified NCD Screening Campaign to achieve 100% coverage for all individuals aged 30 and above, delivered through nearly 1.85 lakh Ayushman Arogya Mandirs (AAM).
Cumulatively, more than 55.50 crore people have been screened for hypertension, and 48.5 for diabetes, 57.74 crore screened for oral cancer, breast cancer and cervical cancer in AAM reducing the burden of NCDs through early management, reaching nearly 90% of its target by the end of 2025.
Taken together, these initiatives show how, under Prime Minister Modi, India is becoming a healthier nation through a balanced mix of preventive, diagnostic, and curative solutions.
The significance lies not only in the scale of the programmes but also in the way they reach citizens at the community level and change health outcomes before disease becomes irreversible.
The same community infrastructure, through grassroots intervention by ASHA workers, Ayushman Arogya Mandirs, the Ni-Kshay platform, is simultaneously addressing TB, anaemia, and other chronic diseases.
This is the larger reform of the public health system, moving from isolated interventions to a more integrated model of care, steadily strengthening the nation’s health map.