India brought forward its TB elimination deadline - but can it be met?

Atul Kumar (name changed) anxiously paced the corridor of a public hospital in India's capital Delhi.

A small-appliance mechanic, he was struggling to secure medicines for his 26-year-old daughter who suffers from drug-resistant tuberculosis (TB). Mr Kumar said his daughter needed 22 tablets of Monopas, an antibiotic used for treating TB, every day.

"In the past 18 months, I haven't received government-supplied medicine for even two full months," he told BBC Hindi in January, months before India's declared deadline to eliminate the infectious disease.

Forced to buy costly drugs from private pharmacies, Mr Kumar was drowning in debt. A week's supply cost 1,400 rupees ($16; £12), more than half his weekly income.

After the BBC raised the issue, authorities supplied the medicines Mr Kumar's daughter needed. Federal Health Secretary Punya Salila Srivastava said that the government usually acts quickly to fix medicine access issues when alerted.

Mr Kumar's daughter is one of millions of Indians suffering from tuberculosis, a bacterial disease that infects the lungs and is spread when the infected person coughs or sneezes.

India, home to 27% of the world's tuberculosis cases, sees two TB-related deaths every three minutes. India's TB burden has long been tied to poor case detection, underfunding and erratic drug supply.

Despite this grim reality, the country has set an ambitious goal. It aims to eliminate TB by the end of 2025, five years ahead of the global target set by the World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations member states.

Elimination, as defined by the WHO, means cutting new TB cases by 80% and deaths by 90% compared with 2015 levels.

But visits to TB centres in Delhi and the eastern state of Odisha revealed troubling gaps in the government's TB programme.

In Odisha's Khordha district, around 30km (18.6 miles) from state capital Bhubaneshwar, 32-year-old day-labourer Kanhucharan Sahu is struggling to continue his two-year-old daughter's TB treatment, with government medicines unavailable for three months and private ones costing 1,500 rupees a month - an unbearable burden.

"We can't see her suffer anymore," he says, his voice breaking. "We even thought of abandoning her."

At Odisha's local TB office, officials promised to review Sahu's case, but a staffer itted, "We rarely get the medicines we need, so we ration them."

Mr Sahu says he hasn't received the promised 1,000 rupees monthly from the federal government and at the local TB office, officials it to chronic shortages, leaving families like his adrift in a failing system.

Vijayalakshmi Routray, who runs the patient group Sahyog, says medicine shortages are now routine, with government outlets often running dry. "How can we talk about ending TB with such gaps":[]}