Eradication of yaws in India

Overview

In India, yaws was first identified during 1887 when the cases were noticed among tea plantation workers in the Cachar district of Assam. Yaws was endemic in several parts of the country during the1940s in geographically contiguous areas in central India which included Sarguja, Bastar and Bilaspur districts of Chattisgarh state, as well as Mirzapur of Uttar Pradesh, and Palamu of the undivided state of Bihar. 

In 1996, the Yaws Eradication Programme (YEP) was started as a pilot project in the Koraput district, Odisha. Subsequently the programme was extended to cover all other endemic states of the country by 1999.