India's tuberculosis burden is the world's largest, but our response to the scourge has been weak.
An 18-year-old girl is fighting not only a war against a strain of drug-resistant TB, but also a legal battle to obtain a strictly regulated new medicine that could save her life.
Her father has filed a lawsuit to compel the government to lift the restrictions on bedaquiline, an antibiotic by Johnson & Johnson that is perhaps the first new treatment for TB in half a century.
The Modi government has imposed strict controls over acquiring bedaquiline as according to medical experts, the overuse of older antibiotics has resulted in the spate of drug-resistant TB in the country. The use of bedaquiline has therefore been restricted to preserve its effectiveness. It is available only in five states across the country, and only as a last resort.