The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) represent an exponential advance from the Millennium Development Goals, with a substantially broader agenda affecting all nations and requiring coordinated global actions.

Successive Governments of India have promised to transform India's unsatisfactory health-care system, culminating in the present government's promise to expand health assurance for all. Despite substantial improvements in some health indicators in the past decade, India contributes disproportionately to the global burden of disease, with health indicators that compare unfavourably with other middle-income countries and India's regional neighbours. Large health disparities between states, between rural and urban populations, and across social classes persist.

WHO estimates that about 170 000 deaths by suicide occur in India every year, but few epidemiological studies of suicide have been done in the country. The authors aimed to quantify suicide mortality in India in 2010.

To sustain the positive economic trajectory that India has had during the past decade, and to honour the fundamental right of all citizens to adequate health care, the health of all Indian people has to be given the highest priority in public policy.

Chronic diseases (eg, cardiovascular diseases, mental health disorders, diabetes, and cancer) and injuries are the leading causes of death and disability in India, and we project pronounced increases in their contribution to the burden of disease during the next 25 years. Most chronic diseases are equally prevalent in poor and rural populations and often occur together.

India has supported the ideal of health for all since it become an independent nation more than 60 years ago.