JOSH Campaign Launched in 11 States for TB-Free India Drive

The correct answer is Joint Squad for Health. The nationwide campaign organised on 13 October 2026 placed JOSH teams in 11 states and 55 districts on a pilot basis, and every team has MY Bharat volunteers, cadets of the National Cadet Corps and a designated Class-I officer. Their task is to build grassroots awareness on timely screening, early detection, treatment adherence and the removal of stigma, and in doing so to carry forward the Jan Andolan approach to tuberculosis elimination. Options A, C and D are invented expansions that fit the letters loosely but do not match the campaign's name. Candidates should also note why community mobilisation matters here: the health ministry had already held workshops on the TB Mukt Abhiyaan with members of Parliament and of legislative assemblies, and this campaign was designed as the next step, to raise active screening and find patients who show no symptoms.

The correct answer is 21%. Yearly emerging cases of tuberculosis in India came down by 21% between 2015 and 2024, as recorded in the World Health Organisation's Global Tuberculosis Report 2025, and this is one of the steepest declines in incidence recorded anywhere, faster than in other high burden nations. Option A is the global decline of 12% over the same years, which is the figure India's performance is compared against, so it is a natural trap. Option D is the fall in deaths due to tuberculosis, which came down by 28% in that period, and candidates often mix up the case decline with the death decline. Option B is simply not a figure in the record. Another pair worth memorising is treatment coverage, which stands at 92% in India against a global coverage of 78%.

The correct answer is 46,118. Under the intensified TB Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan, that many Gram Panchayats have been awarded TB free certification, and the same drive has taken cumulative screenings past 28.1 crore, provided TB Preventive Treatment to over 20 lakh people and added 5.7 lakh new Nikshay Mitras. Option A echoes the screening figure of 28.1 crore and option D echoes the 1.38 crore beneficiaries of the Nikshay Poshan Yojana, so both are distractors drawn from other numbers in the same record. Option C is close to the count of new Nikshay Mitras, which is 5.7 lakh, but is not the panchayat figure. The response has also been accelerated by a 34-fold increase in X-ray screening through handheld units, by the TB Mukt Bharat App with its chatbot Khushi and by AI driven triage tools.

The correct answer is 2020. In that year the Government of India renamed the Revised National Tuberculosis Control Programme as the National TB Elimination Programme, a change that reflects the aim of ending the disease in India ahead of the global target year of 2030. The programme rests on the pillars of Detect, Treat, Prevent and Build, and the National Strategic Plan to End TB in India 2020-25 was announced in June 2020 with the same four pillars. Option A is the year the Nikshay Poshan Yojana began, under which each notified patient receives 1,000 rupees a month and 4,454.68 crore rupees have gone to 1.38 crore beneficiaries. Option C is the year the Pradhan Mantri TB Mukt Bharat Abhiyaan was launched, on 9 September 2022, as an additional component of the programme. Option D is the year of the WHO report cited for the decline figures.