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The Ministry of Health and Family Welfare held a high-level review of India's progress towards eliminating malaria by 2030, chaired by Aradhana Patnaik, Additional Secretary and Mission Director of the National Health Mission.
Malaria cases and deaths fell by nearly 80% between 2015 and 2025, and the number of high-burden districts dropped from 155 to 33; 160 districts reported zero indigenous cases during 2022-2025.
The 33 remaining high-burden districts lie across nine States and Union Territories and accounted for 64% of India's malaria cases and 54% of its malaria deaths in 2025.
States were told to strengthen the Test, Treat and Track strategy, implement District Action Plans in all 33 districts and Village Action Plans in high-burden villages, and keep diagnostics and anti-malarial drugs available in hard-to-reach areas.
On data quality, States were asked to review unusually high Annual Blood Examination Rates for duplicate testing and repeat entries, and to report asymptomatic cases found in mass screening separately, excluding them from API and ABER calculations.
API is the number of confirmed malaria cases per thousand population in a year: total positives divided by total population, multiplied by 1,000. ABER measures how much blood testing the programme actually did relative to the population — it is treated as an index of the programme's operational efficiency, and API's validity depends on it, because a low case count means nothing if hardly anyone was tested. That relationship is why the review asked States to inspect unusually high ABERs. An inflated ABER can come from genuine intensive surveillance, but it can equally come from duplicate testing, repeated data entries, or from folding mass asymptomatic screening into routine surveillance figures. Each of those distorts both indicators — and in an elimination programme, where the object is to find the last remaining transmission rather than to report a comfortable number, distorted surveillance data is the most dangerous failure mode. Hence the instruction that asymptomatic cases detected through mass screening be reported separately and excluded from API and ABER calculations.
Simple Analogy: API is how many fish you caught; ABER is how many times you cast the net. Reporting the catch without the casts tells you nothing about how many fish are left in the lake.
Set out the vision, goals and phased targets for eliminating malaria from India by 2030.
Key: It categorises districts by endemicity and sequences elimination — low-burden areas move to elimination first while high-burden areas concentrate on burden reduction, which is the logic behind the district-level focus in this review.
Interrupt local transmission and reach zero indigenous cases across the country by 2027, ahead of the 2030 elimination goal.
Key: Built on three pillars — surveillance as a core intervention, universal access to diagnosis and treatment through 'test, treat and track', and universal access to prevention through optimised vector control.
The umbrella mission through which malaria programme funds and State Mission Directors operate.
Key: The review was chaired by the Mission Director of the NHM, and NHM Mission Directors from the affected States attended — the mission is the delivery channel rather than a separate malaria scheme.
Match interventions to local epidemiology and geography rather than applying a uniform national protocol.
Key: District Action Plans are to be implemented in all 33 high-burden districts, with Village Action Plans in high-burden villages within them.
India's nodal national body for the prevention and elimination of malaria and other vector-borne diseases, working under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. It publishes the API and ABER data the programme is judged on.
The Union health ministry's flagship mission through which State health programmes, including malaria elimination, are financed and monitored; each State has an NHM Mission Director.
The parent ministry, which convened this review with State programme officers, District Collectors, Chief Medical Officers and District Malaria Officers.
Malaria elimination sits under SDG 3 on health and well-being; India's 2030 target is aligned to that global deadline, which is why the release frames the review around an SDG commitment.
Source reduction, water-logging control and community fever reporting depend on Panchayati Raj institutions, Self-Help Groups and community volunteers rather than on health staff — an instance of a health outcome resting on local government capacity.
The residual high-burden districts overlap heavily with forested and tribal regions in the Northeast and central India, linking malaria elimination to broader questions of health access in Fifth Schedule and remote areas.
The instruction to strip asymptomatic mass-screening results out of API and ABER is a general lesson in programme statistics: an indicator that can be improved by changing what is counted stops measuring what it was designed to measure.
India runs comparable elimination or eradication programmes for tuberculosis, kala-azar, lymphatic filariasis and measles-rubella, all of which face the same 'last mile' problem of concentrated residual burden.
GS Paper 2 > Governance > Issues relating to Health; Social Justice > Government Interventions
General Awareness > Science (Biology) and Government Programmes
General Awareness > Science and Current Affairs
Vector-borne disease elimination programmes and health indicators appear regularly in UPSC Prelims and Mains GS2; malaria data is refreshed annually through the World Malaria Report and NCVBDC releases.
Confirmed malaria cases per thousand population in a year — total positives divided by total population, multiplied by 1,000.
A measure of how much of the population the programme actually tested in a year; treated as an index of operational efficiency, and the basis on which API's validity rests.
A malaria case acquired through local mosquito-borne transmission rather than imported from elsewhere. Zero indigenous cases, sustained, is the test of interrupted transmission.
The core strategy of prompt diagnosis, complete treatment and follow-up tracking of every case, reaffirmed in this review because delayed diagnosis and treatment were identified as critical contributors to malaria deaths.
An infection detected by screening in a person showing no symptoms; the review directed that such cases from mass screening be reported separately and kept out of API and ABER calculations.
Removing or modifying mosquito breeding sites — standing water, water-logging — as opposed to killing adult mosquitoes or treating patients.