Rare cancers in India: A road less travelled

Globally, rare cancers as a group are commoner than any single common cancer. They represent an unmet medical need, and this issue gets further amplified in India due to various reasons, including the limited accessibility of healthcare system to the population at large. The scarce available data yet only represents the tip of the iceberg, due to poor registration and incomplete medical cover. Rare cancers, as a consequence, are driven further away from attention of the policy.makers and financial authorities. Poor research prospectives and lesser administrative support restrict the research in this field. There is an urgent need for initiating studies exclusively on rare cancers in India, considering their prevalence and deprived management, as many countries are already pursuing work in this field. All such inadequacies ultimately affect the patient outcomes. In this review, after discussing these aspects, we suggest a stepwise approach to improve the care of rare cancers in India.