Shreya Tripathi sleeps most of the day. At night, she lies awake. Only 18, she has been fighting tuberculosis for five years. Her voice on the telephone from her home in Patna, eastern India, is a whisper. If she speaks for more than a few minutes, she becomes breathless.

Though exhausted, Shreya is also fighting another battle – in the Delhi high court – to demand a new TB drug. Every other medication she has tried has failed to beat the disease.

Shreya has a form of TB caused by bacteria resistant to treatment even with the most powerful drugs. She wants the Indian government to give her bedaquiline, the first new TB drug to be registered in more than 50 years. Its use is tightly controlled. Only six government hospitals are allowed to administer it, and even then only as a last resort.

India has one of the highest levels of drug-resistant tuberculosis in the world. To preserve bedaquiline’s effectiveness – if the bacteria mutate to resist it, there is nothing else available – the Indian government is strict on who can have it and how they are monitored. The National Institute of Tuberculosis and Respiratory Diseases in New Delhi, one of the authorised six centres, has refused to give Shreya the drug.

Shreya was diagnosed with TB in 2012, when she was 13. Doctors in Patna started her on a TB regimen but she proved resistant to the first and second lines of treatment. She and her father, Kaushal, a civil servant, are tired of running around hospitals getting nowhere, while Shreya’s condition worsens.

Two years ago, she had to drop out of school because she was so weak. She needs a wheelchair to get around. Swimming and badminton – her favourite sports – have become distant memories.

Shreya is a category five patient, which means she needs treatment for “extreme” drug resistant tuberculosis, or XDR-TB.

The family only became aware of bedaquiline in October, after a visit to Dr Zarir Udwadia, a consultant chest physician at Hinduja hospital in Mumbai. “It gave us hope. I was desperate by then because nothing had worked for my daughter,” says Kaushal.

Udwadia knew the exact combination of drugs that Shreya needed to take with bedaquiline, which does not work on its own. However, government protocol concerning the drug prevents him, as a private doctor, from accessing it. He told the family to get the drugs from the national institute in New Delhi, but they were refused because Shreya was not a resident.

“We argued and fought with them,” says Kaushal. “They agreed to take a sputum sample from Shreya in November for a drug susceptibility test to see which drugs she is resistant to, but they already knew she was drug resistant from earlier such tests. They wasted precious time.”

They kept calling the hospital for the result. Two months later, they were told the sample had been contaminated. On 28 December, Shreya provided a fresh sample and was told to wait four to six weeks for the culture.

“It was then I told Papa to go to court. Even if it’s too late for me, at least other patients will benefit from it. Just imagine how hard it must be for really poor people to get this drug,” says Shreya.

The case has been heard in Delhi high court this week. Saket Sikri, counsel for the national institute, says that the hospital cannot prescribe the other drugs that must be administered with bedaquiline until it gets the culture report.

“A wrong combination can kill and, since this drug is her last hope, we have to get it right. We are being humane, not bureaucratic, and are following World Health Organisation guidelines,” says Sikri. “The institute cannot choose which parts of the WHO protocol to follow and which to ignore.

“I think the judge’s final decision will hinge on whether he thinks my client is following WHO’s guidance on the use of [bedaquiline]. The judge can’t decide which doctor or which line of treatment is correct but he can judge if the guidelines are being followed and, in that respect, the institute is justified in waiting for the drug susceptibility test report to come.”

However, TB experts have said the culture the institute is awaiting is unnecessary, since it is already known that Shreya is drug resistant.

Anand Grover, a senior lawyer with the Lawyers Collective, which represents Shreya, says that the government has failed to update its own protocol to reflect the latest WHO guidance on bedaquiline, under which several XDR-TB patients have been put on drug regimens similar to the one prescribed by Udwadia. “There is evidence from other countries, including South Africa, showing that this combination has been successful in treating XDR-TB,” says Grover.

Grover has told the court that the prospect of Shreya losing her life without access to bedaquiline should outweigh concerns about any possible resistance that might occur. He has also told the court that the government is following the WHO protocol dating from 2013, when there was limited data on the efficacy and safety of the new drug.

Backing Shreya’s team is testimony from Dr Jennifer F Furin, from the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School, who said Shreya should have been started on a bedaquiline-containing regimen in October.

“Additional delays … threaten her life and the effectiveness of this agent. It is unfortunate that there have already been so many significant delays in providing [bedaquiline] to Ms Tripathi,” said Dr Furin in her written testimony.

Dr Furin has previously criticised India for its slow rollout of the drug. In her Delhi high court testimony she said that scientific publications have set a benchmark that between 30% and 45% of patients with multi-drug resistant TB in a country should be able to access bedaquiline.

“In India, this means a minimum of 30,000 persons per year, based on 2016 estimates. As of 1 December 2016, only 164 individuals had been reported … to be receiving [bedaquiline]. This slow rollout … was noted as a problem by the WHO,” said Dr Furin.

There will be a further hearing on 18 January. “I don’t think the court will give it to me,” says Shreya. “But because of Papa’s efforts, at least other patients may get it later.”

• An update made on 26 January 2017: the Delhi High Court announced on 20 January that the hospital had agreed to let a Mumbai TB specialist treat Shreya Tripathi with bedaquiline.