The World Health Organisation (WHO) has declared Tuberculosis a global emergency. TB Kills 2 million people each year globally. Every second someone in the world is newly infected with TB. Nearly 01% of the world's population is newly infected with TB each year. In India every year there are approximately 02 million new cases, of which 800,000 are infectious. 450,000 people die of TB every year, more than 1000 every day, 01 every minute.

The WHO recommended treatment strategy for detection and cure of TB is DOTS.  DOTS attempts to improve the patient adherence, patient holding for the full duration of treatment, ensuring cure, prevents new infection and reduces the occurrence of drug resistance. DOTS produce cure rates of 95% in the poorest of the countries. DOTS prevent the development of MDR-TB by curing infectious patients.
Since DOTS was introduced on the global scale 22 of the high burden countries which bear 80% of the estimated incident cases had adopted DOTS by 1998. DOTS targets to detect 70% of new infectious TB cases and to cure 85% of those detected. The strategy is cost effective & very effective tool for the control of TB in the third world countries.

The success of DOTS is linked to the problem of ignorance, illiteracy & poverty, rampant in India. Therefore supportive measures play an important role for the success of DOTS.

With support from CARE – India, SHIS supported DOTS within the RNTCP plan of action to provide better success for the programme. It is based on 1) nutrition and 2) partnership & community support. Based on these two areas of support, the action plan for the proposed project, called "Control of Tuberculosis through community based DOTS" which is being implemented in the selected rural areas of West Bengal, in Nadia, North and South 24 Parganas District.

Peer Promotion Strategy of Community Based DOTS and Community Mobilization on TB has emerged an important strategy to control the most common opportunistic infection, TB in West Bengal.