Investigators surveyed households in six districts—Bhopal, Jaipur, Lucknow, Patna, Pune and Ratlam—using a multi-stage selection of blocks and villages followed by universal household enumeration. The final analytical sample comprised 82,636 individuals drawn from 12,736 households after data cleaning. The team reported a combined self-reported tuberculosis prevalence of 0.15% (calculated as individuals currently receiving anti-tubercular treatment plus those who completed treatment within the past two years), which the authors equated to roughly 150 per lakh population. The dataset did not permit microbiological confirmation; TB classification relied on respondent report of treatment status.
The investigators noted that prior TB was self-reported by 0.29% of participants. Current ATT recipients were 0.07% and those who had completed ATT within the last two years were 0.08%. The study authors emphasized that the two-year window for recent treatment was chosen because most relapses occur within that period.
Survey responses documented several vulnerability factors that the study team framed as increasing susceptibility to TB. Self-reported HIV reactivity was 0.9% of the sample. Current smoking was reported in 5% of individuals, while 94% were never-smokers. The prevalence of self-reported silicosis was 1.2%; occupational exposure to silica dust (mining, stone work, construction) was recorded at about 1.1% (the source reports this as <2%). Diabetes mellitus was reported by 1.4% of participants. Persistent cough lasting more than two weeks was present in 4% of the surveyed population.
The investigators provided these point estimates with corresponding 95% confidence intervals in tabulated form. They also cautioned that absolute numbers in some subgroups were small, producing wide confidence intervals and limiting precision in those strata.
The cohort skewed slightly male—52% male, 47% female and 1% identifying as third gender. Most participants (77%) were aged 15 years or older; 7% were under 6 years and 16% were aged 6–15 years. Occupational classification showed 60% in the “Not in labour force” category (including women, children, and dependents), while the largest active employment group was “Agriculture & Allied” at 14%. Community group distribution indicated 44% from Other Backward Classes and 30% from Scheduled Castes.
Occupational exposure aligned with higher crude TB prevalence in the survey. The authors reported higher TB proportions among participants who indicated silica exposure at mines or construction sites compared with those without such exposure. The exact counts and denominators for occupational strata are presented in the study tables.
Investigators performed stratified, crude analyses to compare TB prevalence among exposed and unexposed groups. The highest crude TB prevalence appeared in smokers (past smokers: 1.07%; current smokers: 0.36%). Participants reporting silica exposure at mining sites had a TB prevalence of 0.32%, while exposure at building construction showed 0.67% prevalence in the crude tabulation. HIV-reactive individuals had a higher crude TB prevalence (0.56%) versus the non-reactive group (0.15%). Those with diabetes mellitus and participants reporting cough >2 weeks had TB prevalences of 0.35% and 0.29% respectively.
The authors explicitly framed these results as exploratory. Several vulnerability strata—particularly silicosis, silica-exposure and HIV—contained small absolute numbers of TB events, producing wide confidence intervals and limited statistical stability. The data were presented as hypothesis-generating, not as definitive measures of risk.
The study’s strengths include large sample size and universal household sampling within randomly selected villages, yielding a granular, community-level snapshot across multiple states. Investigators suggested these grassroots data could inform targeted active case finding strategies under the National Tuberculosis Elimination Programme (NTEP), by identifying local pockets where vulnerability factors cluster.
Key limitations are clearly documented. TB status was self-reported and not confirmed with microbiological testing, so active disease could not be validated or classified beyond treatment-reported categories. Several exposed subgroups had very small absolute numbers of TB cases, which produced wide confidence intervals and limited the precision of subgroup prevalence estimates. The authors did not apply cluster-design adjustment and justified this by describing the selection steps and universal sampling of household members; this analytic choice is reported in the methods. Data on some occupational denominators and the exact proportion employed in stone-mining or construction industries were not provided in detail. Finally, because the survey relied on a single household respondent to report for all members, misclassification or recall bias cannot be excluded.
Investigators concluded that the dataset offers actionable, community-level prevalence estimates of tuberculosis and several vulnerability factors that may help refine NTEP active case finding in rural high-burden settings. The study leaves open specific questions for future work: microbiological confirmation of self-reported TB, larger targeted studies of silica-exposed workers, and analytic designs that can provide adjusted measures of association between vulnerabilities and confirmed TB outcomes.