Tuberculosis has killed many more Indians in a year than decades of insurgencies and incidents of sectarian violence. Of the 10.4 million people in the world who had TB in 2015, three million were Indians. Across the globe, 1.8 million patients died from TB in 2015, and almost half a million of them died in India. A staggering number of Indians — over 400 million — are estimated to be infected with TB.

An airborne disease, TB knows no borders. Its impact on India’s economy, an engine of global financial growth, affects wallets worldwide. TB patients miss three to four months of work and often even more. Not being able to work for such long periods leaves a person’s family impoverished and leaves the economy limping.

Yet the Indian government has failed to grapple with the urgency and magnitude of the crisis. In February 2017, Arun Jaitley, India’s federal minister of finance, announced the audacious goal of eliminating TB by 2025. Mr. Jaitley did not offer any hints about how this incredible feat is to be accomplished. Bewilderingly, along with his grand proclamations of ending TB, Mr. Jaitley’s revised budget estimates for 2017-18 show a $2 million decrease in funding for India’s TB program compared with 2016.

Within three decades of its conception, India’s Revised National Tuberculosis Control Program (R.N.T.C.P.) has become one of the world’s largest public TB programs. It aspires to provide free TB treatment to all Indians. To do so, it has established a network of laboratories and clinics throughout the country as well as a robust community health worker program to provide rapid testing and standardized treatment for TB.