4 min readJul 20, 2026 06:19 AM IST
First published on: Jul 20, 2026 at 06:19 AM IST
On July 8, the World Health Organisation (WHO) released its Global Status Report on Cancer. The figures are staggering: An estimated 20.6 million new cancer cases and nearly 10 million deaths worldwide each year, that is, more than 26,000 lives lost each day. At current rates, the WHO predicts 35 million annual cases by 2050.
In addition to the scale of the disease, the report highlights an inherent inequity. A woman with breast cancer in a high-income country has an 87 per cent chance of surviving five years, compared to about 42 per cent in a low-income country, a gap that is less due to biology and more due to where she happens to live. While 68 to 94 per cent of wealthier countries have access to the top 20 priority cancer medicines, only 9 to 54 per cent of low- and lower-middle-income countries do.
India’s own numbers fit into this picture, albeit not comfortably. With an estimated 15.33 lakh new cases expected in 2024, a Rajya Sabha standing committee noted that roughly one in nine Indians faces a lifetime risk of cancer. The committee has also sought expert recommendations to improve the affordability of cancer care and expand access to diagnostics. According to GLOBOCAN 2022 data, breast cancer accounted for over 1.92 lakh new cases and over 98,000 deaths in India in 2022. More than half of these cases are detected at an advanced stage, making treatment more expensive and less effective. I’m writing this while undergoing cancer treatment myself. What has struck me is not the disease itself but the ordeal of surviving it: Waiting for an appointment, the anxiety, and the arithmetic every patient does, working out which drug she can afford, which treatment package is feasible, and how much her insurance might cover.
A breast cancer patient who cannot afford targeted therapy, immunotherapy, or hormonal therapy is not just facing a market or health-system failure. She is witnessing the slow erosion of a right that the Constitution is meant to guarantee. The same applies to access to essential medicines.
The right to health has long been recognised as integral to the right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution. The Supreme Court has held that a healthy body is the foundation of all human activity; that the right to life includes access to medical care and a decent standard of living; that the state has a duty to make essential medicines affordable.
Litigation over access to medicines, compulsory licensing, or drug pricing should not languish in courts for years, as it often does. In 2022, a retired bank employee with HER2-negative metastatic breast cancer approached the Kerala High Court seeking compulsory licensing of the patented drug Ribociclib under Sections 92 and 100 of the Patents Act, 1970, because its prohibitive cost made treatment unaffordable. The court directed the Centre to consider compulsory licensing, but the petitioner died before the matter was decided. The High Court converted the proceedings into a suo motu case, In Re Exorbitant Pricing of Life Saving Patented Medicines, which remains pending despite having been listed for hearing more than 57 times. If delayed treatment is already a rights violation, prohibitively expensive treatment cannot be any less so.
In the 20 years since India aligned its patent regime with TRIPS, it has issued only one compulsory licence: For Bayer’s Nexavar in 2012, a drug for kidney and liver cancer, which reduced its monthly supply cost from Rs 2.8 lakh to under Rs 9,000. The 2001 Doha Declaration on the TRIPS Agreement and Public Health, which India helped shape, holds that intellectual property protection should never come at the cost of public health. The tools already exist. What is missing is the willingness to use them.
The WHO has declared this a global emergency. For India, it is a pressing policy issue and a constitutional question. The Rajya Sabha’s inquiry into affordable cancer care is a welcome opening. What remains uncertain is the political will to act before it is too late, even for a patient like me who can afford treatment.
The writer is a public-health specialist working on reproductive health and biotechnologies
