India Showcases UHC Gains at UNGA81, Co-launches OneSCD

India set out its record on health at two meetings held alongside the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA81) in New York, in a release issued on 24 September 2026 by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Union Health Secretary Punya Salila Srivastava spoke at both.

Universal Health Coverage

The first was the Seventh Annual Ministerial Meeting of the Group of Friends of Universal Health Coverage and Global Health. There the Health Secretary described a chain of care that runs from the primary level up to tertiary hospitals and is meant to keep a patient from being ruined by the cost of treatment. The numbers she placed before the meeting are the ones to carry into an examination hall.

She named Ayushman Bharat Pradhan Mantri Jan Arogya Yojana, the publicly funded health assurance scheme, as the shield for poorer households, and added the Free Drugs and Diagnostics Service Initiative and the Prime Minister's National Dialysis Programme. On the digital side she pointed to ABHA-linked records and registries of facilities and professionals, and to teleradiology, artificial-intelligence-assisted X-rays and Mobile Medical Units.

Hepatitis elimination by 2030

At a side event on stronger global action against hepatitis, she restated the goal of ending Hepatitis B and C as public health threats by 2030. Screening now runs from nearly 1.80 lakh primary facilities up to tertiary hospitals under the National Health Mission, treatment has spread to 1,039 centres, and close to 225 million people have been screened since the National Viral Hepatitis Control Programme began in 2018. Mother-to-child transmission is being tackled through the maternal and child health framework.

OneSCD and the 2047 goal

India co-hosted the launch of OneSCD, a global partnership on sickle cell care, with the Government of Nigeria, WHO, UNICEF, Africa CDC, the World Coalition on Sickle Cell Disease and St. Jude Children's Research Hospital. India's own National Sickle Cell Anaemia Elimination Mission, begun in 2023, aims to end the disease as a public health problem by 2047. Under it more than 7.29 crore people have been screened, over 20 lakh carriers found, 2.5 lakh people diagnosed and more than 4.93 crore sickle cell cards handed out, alongside work on point-of-care testing, hydroxyurea therapy and an indigenous gene-editing treatment.