Counting cancer: On making cancer a notifiable disease in India
What’s good for the goose is surely good for the geese. What the States will benefit from, the country could too. In India, cancer is not a notifiable disease at the national level, keeping with the Health Ministry’s position that such notification is only for communicable diseases. Population-based cancer registries and hospital-based cancer registries are currently the only national tool at the disposal of the Centre to count cancer cases. Unfortunately, these registries cover about 10%-16 % of the population, and have an urban, government health care set-up skew. However, several States have taken the lead on this front, making cancer a notifiable disease within their boundaries. Telangana is the latest to join the list of States that have made cancer a notifiable disease , bringing the total number of States doing so to 17. With the Global Cancer Observatory (affiliated to the World Health Organization) projecting an estimated increase of 1.05 million cases between 2022 (1.41 million) and 2045 (2.46 million), the rise is expected to be a staggering over 74%. Given these projections, thanks to an increasing life span and ageing demographics, changes in lifestyle and diet, it becomes all the more important to be armed with data and get ready for vanguard action from a public health point of view. While State action can, to an extent, solve the data question, any benefit thus derived from notifying health authorities of every single case of cancer, it cannot become a rubric by which the nation can contour its cancer control programme. Apart from existing registries covering mostly urban and semi-urban posts, care in India is also delivered in good measure through the private sector and that data set is not uniformly captured. The Indian government must pay heed to its own counsel — the Indian Council of Medical Research, National Centre for Disease Informatics and Research (now ICMR-NINE) had recommended that cancer be made a notifiable disease years ago. It is a fact that establishing cancer as a notifiable disease will mean a sudden increase in the number of cases being recorded, but it must not be considered a liability. Instead, it is merely part of the process of crafting a studied, and evidence-based response — health care and information, education, and communication (IEC) — to cancer at the country level. While bold advances in research and treatment methodologies have retrieved cancer from the fear and the utter helplessness surrounding it, the heart of the issue remains the lack of data. Taking lessons from the States, the Centre must recalibrate and make cancer a notifiable disease in India. Published - July 04, 2026 12:10 am IST Read Comments Copy link Email Facebook Twitter Telegram LinkedIn WhatsApp Reddit READ LATER SEE ALL Remove Related Topics cancer / India / health / hospital and clinic / population / government / World Health Organization / demography / lifestyle diseases / diet (health) / disease / Telangana
- 1Public health is a State subject under Entry 6 of List II in the Seventh Schedule of the Constitution, which explains why 17 states, including Telangana, have independently made cancer notifiable rather than waiting for a central mandate. The Centre's own health powers largely flow through Entry 29 of the Concurrent List, covering prevention of infectious disease spread, a category cancer does not fit. This federal structure means genuine national cancer surveillance will likely require cooperative, consultative mechanisms between the Centre and states rather than a single top-down law.
- 2The World Health Organization's Global Cancer Observatory data cited in this editorial reflects a wider international push, following the WHO's 2017 World Health Assembly resolution urging member states to strengthen cancer registries as part of universal health coverage. India's continued reliance on incomplete registries leaves it behind comparable middle-income countries such as Thailand and Sri Lanka, which have achieved broader registry coverage through mandatory notification systems. Aligning with this global practice would also improve India's reporting against the WHO's Noncommunicable Disease Global Monitoring Framework, which tracks cancer mortality reduction targets for 2030.
- 3Communicable disease notification in India traditionally derives from the colonial-era Epidemic Diseases Act, 1897, later supplemented by the National Health Mission's Integrated Disease Surveillance Programme, neither of which currently mandates cancer reporting nationally. ICMR's National Centre for Disease Informatics and Research, now restructured as ICMR-NINE, is the technical body that recommended notifiable status years ago, leaving the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare to act through fresh executive rules or amended statutory frameworks. Without a uniform central notification rule, enforcement will remain fragmented across differing state-specific orders.
- 4The Global Cancer Observatory projects India's annual cancer cases will rise from 1.41 million in 2022 to 2.46 million by 2045, an increase of over 74 percent driven by rising life expectancy, urbanisation and lifestyle-related risk factors such as tobacco use and dietary change. Current registries capture only an estimated 10 to 16 percent of the population, meaning national burden figures are largely modelled rather than directly counted. Closing this data gap matters for budgeting too, since the National Cancer Control Programme's screening infrastructure and funding decisions depend on accurate incidence figures rather than extrapolated estimates.
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