FICCI-EY compendium of recommendations on ‘Road Map for Making Cancer Care Affordable and Accessible in India’

FICCI-EY Parthenon recently launched a compendium of recommendations titled ‘Road map for making Cancer care affordable and accessible in India’. The paper is a culmination of recommendations gathered from five regional roundtables organized over a year till September 2024, under the aegis of the Ministry of Health & Family Welfare, Govt of India. Among these, there is a strong recommendation for the Government of India to roll out a Comprehensive National Cancer Care Policy/Program with a dedicated funding outlay for the top six high-burden cancers.

The compendium highlights that India faces a sizeable cancer incidence burden. As per estimates India’s reported cancer incidence in 2022 was at 19 to 20 lakhs, whereas the real incidence was 1.5 to 3 times higher than the reported cases. The growth rate for cancer incidence is expected to further intensify over the next five to six years with new cases estimated to reach less than 45 lakh. The cancer care infrastructure is not equally distributed among rural and urban areas, leading to a huge burden on tertiary care centres. Further, treatment cost for cancer care is financially prohibitive i.e. almost 3x that of other non-communicable diseases (NCD) and continues to increase. Despite this, India’s participation in global clinical trials is currently 4%, with 20% of the global disease burden.