The fight against antimicrobial resistance

India is developing local solutions to a global problem that was exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic.

India is a global hotspot of antimicrobial resistance. It is home to 1.4 billion people, which is nearly 18% of the world’s population, and many of them live in poverty. It has a booming but sometimes poorly regulated pharmaceutical industry and a public–private divide in health care that has created simultaneously both excessive use of antibiotics and limited access to them.

Antibiotic-resistant infections are estimated to have directly killed nearly 300,000 people in India — including tens of thousands of newborn babies — in 2019 alone, and been a factor in a further one million deaths that year.