India’s AMR Warning

Antimicrobial resistance is eroding the medical safety net that modern medicine relies on—from surgery and chemotherapy to routine infections—demanding urgent policy action

- ADITYA SINHA

India faces rising deaths, higher healthcare costs, unsafe treatment outcomes and a looming economic burden unless urgent systemic reform follows

For most of modern history, infection was a matter of fate. A cut could kill. Pneumonia could be a death sentence. Childbirth itself was dangerous. What changed this was antibiotics. They turned the invisible microbial world from an existential threat into a manageable risk.

That bargain is now under strain. Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) means that bacteria and fungi no longer respond to medicines designed to kill them. The drugs still look the same. The prescriptions still get written. But the microbes have learned how to survive. Quietly, steadily, and often unnoticed, treatments that once worked stop working.

This is precisely why the Prime Minister Modi warned against indiscriminate use of antibiotics in his last Mann Ki Baat address of 2025. PM Modi said antibiotics are increasingly failing to work against common illnesses such as pneumonia and urinary tract infections (UTIs).

Recent hospital surveillance data collated by the Indian Council of Medical Research offers a sobering glimpse into how this erosion is unfolding. In 2024 alone, Indian tertiary hospitals recorded nearly 99,000 culture-confirmed infections. More than 70 per cent of bloodstream infections (among the most dangerous clinical conditions) were caused by Gram-negative bacteria, organisms that are increasingly resistant to powerful antibiotics. These are not rare pathogens; they are among the most common causes of everyday infections.