Tuberculosis (TB) remains a pressing global health challenge, with millions of people falling ill and losing their lives to this infectious disease each year. Despite significant progress in TB control efforts, there are still formidable challenges to be addressed on the path to achieving TB elimination by 2030. The articles presented shed light on the complexities of TB care, including issues such as stigma, mental health implications, drug resistance, underdiagnosis, and the impact of socioeconomic factors and the COVID-19 pandemic.

This year's World TB Day theme: Yes! We Can End TB serves to remind us that we can and must do more to end TB. Different stakeholders, governments, civil society, and the private sector are collectively committed to ending the global TB epidemic by 2030.

To achieve the goal, all partners should collaborate to strengthen the existing diagnostic and treatment facility, patient support system and communication that needs to be built around the strategy. The concurrent multi-prong approach will lead to the achievement of the goals. All stakeholders must actively participate in the TB elimination program to augment their efforts in this direction to make this dream a reality. Synergies must be developed among partners, and there should be no duplication of efforts.

This year World TB Day theme: Yes! We Can End TB serves to remind us that we can and must do more to end TB. Different stakeholders, governments, civil society, and the private sector are collectively committed to ending the global TB epidemic by 2030.

To achieve the goal, all partners should collaborate to strengthen the existing diagnostic and treatment facility, patient support system and communication that needs to be built around the strategy. The concurrent multi-prong approach will lead to the achievement of the goals. All stakeholders must actively participate in the TB elimination program to augment their efforts in this direction to make this dream a reality. Synergies must be developed among partners, and there should be no duplication of efforts.

Robert Koch’s announcement of the tubercle bacillus in 1882 was a landmark, but attention in colonial India moved from the bacillus to the conditions in which it spread. From the turn of the century, tuberculosis was viewed as ‘a malady of civilization,’ caused by overcrowding and stress associated with urban industrialized life. Tuberculosis was euphemistically referred to as cough and or fever. It was not high on the medical agenda of British India, unlike cholera or malaria, as it did not directly affect the economy or administration [1]. Yet, in Bombay city, tuberculosis came to be recognized as a public health challenge, and it was Sir Ratan J. Tata who suggested the project of the Anti -Tuberculosis League (ATL) at a public meeting in 1912 and promised an annual donation of Rs. 15,000, for ten years.

Data Science is an emerging discipline. Ubiquitous digitalization, the consequent generation of ‘big’ data, the capability to process the data, and the semiotics of its translation to innovate solutions to problems in healthcare and other domains are catalysts of its rapid growth. Digitalization is generating voluminous streams of numerical, textual, visual, auditory, haptic, and other types of data about our bodies, the things we use, and what we do where and when. Data Science is the science of translating this data into information, meaning, interpretation, knowledge, action, feedback, and learning. Systematically mining this large volume and variety of data can yield novel insights and innovative systemic solutions to current healthcare problems.

The impact of the unclean and crowded living conditions, especially that experienced in the thickly populated slums of the developing countries, towards enhancing the risk of tuberculosis (TB) infection is well known, and the same has been documented previously [1-3]. Historically, TB has been a disease associated with poor people across the world. On an average about 2–3 million people succumb to this neglected yet a lethal disease. Of this population, a large fraction belongs to the underprivileged habitats in the developing countries and the poor, urban neighbourhoods in wealthier, advanced powers [1].