Puducherry has emerged as a frontrunner in India’s National Tuberculosis Elimination Programme after raising its tuberculosis testing rate by 136 % since 2015 and cutting incidence by 59 % over the past decade, health officials said on Friday. The Union Territory’s Intermediate Reference Laboratory at the Government Hospital for Chest Diseases is now ranked the country’s best, capable of performing 1.2 lakh tests a year. During a 100-day door-to-door campaign this year, authorities screened 380,000 residents—surpassing their target—and tested more than 15,000 presumptive patients with nucleic-acid amplification technology. Ten local medical colleges account for almost half of all TB case notifications and are helping declare 40 villages TB-free in 2025, up from eight last year. Puducherry is also the first Indian Union Territory to place TB patients under a “Family Adoption” scheme in which medical students adopt households and screen all members. To curb fatalities, doctors at Indira Gandhi Medical College have begun using verbal autopsy techniques to analyse every tuberculosis-related death and refine clinical responses.