Srinagar, May 24: The J&K government’s order to declare cancer a “notifiable disease” could become one of the most consequential health policy interventions in J&K in years.
The notification issued earlier this week by the Health and Medical Education (H&ME) Department mandates that all hospitals, laboratories, clinics, nursing homes, medical colleges, diagnostic centres, and even institutions maintaining cancer-related data to report cancer cases to authorities.
The decision comes at a time when cancer is increasingly emerging as a major non-communicable disease burden in J&K, particularly in Kashmir.
Doctors and sketchy data repeatedly highlighted the rising incidences of lung, breast, oral, gastrointestinal and prostate cancers.
However, biggest challenge in policy interventions has been the absence of a unified and mandatory reporting mechanism, doctors believe.
Cancer data in J&K is largely sourced from individual tertiary hospitals such as Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences and Government Medical Colleges.
It is often suspected that the real burden was not demonstrated accurately by these figures as many patients sought treatment outside J&K, many in private facilities, while many others sought treatment at multiple facilities, thus posing the risk of duplicated registrations.
According to figures placed before the J&K Assembly earlier this year, more than 32,000 cancer cases were reported in J&K over the last three years.
Kashmir accounted for the overwhelming majority of cases. The government acknowledged in the Assembly that cancer incidence in J&K has been rising steadily.
Public health experts believe making cancer notifiable will change the nature and scale of response, and add active surveillance to the health metrics.
In India, “notifiable diseases” has traditionally been limited to infectious outbreaks such as cholera, tuberculosis or dengue.
This helped the governments to monitor spread and allocate resources rapidly.
Now that the same principle is being applied to cancer, marking that the disease is not merely as an individual medical condition but as a population-level public health crisis, that requires systematic tracking.
The most immediate, health experts believe would be better epidemiological mapping.
District-wise trends, age patterns, gender differences, and clusters of specific cancers would be a reality.
In J&K, cancer is often linked to environmental exposures, smoking prevalence, pesticide use, occupational hazards, dietary patterns and lifestyle transitions.
The notifiable status will dispel or confirm these assumptions.
Without mandatory reporting, and through research, such patterns have remained anecdotal.
Beyond treatment, cancer surveillance data would ensure better budgeting and insurance coverage. For academics, the a reliable cancer registry integrated with national systems, may give researchers access to long-term trend data necessary to study regional risk factors scientifically.
States like Punjab, Tamil Nadu, Haryana and Kerala have already introduced varying norms of compulsory cancer notification.
Health experts across the country have been vocal about the contention that India’s cancer burden is much higher than estimated.
In 2025, the Supreme Court through a Public Interest Litigation sought nationwide notification of cancer as a reportable disease.
Parliamentary Standing Committee on Health and Family Welfare in its 139th report in 2022 warned that cancer deaths were underreported as “cardio-vascular failure”.
This, the committee said, was weakening India’s cancer data, and distorting true burden of the disease.
