Maharashtra Is Expanding Free, Home-Based Palliative Care — Here’s What Families Should Know
Maharashtra’s government has begun expanding free, home-based palliative care beyond the districts and diagnoses it used to cover. Here’s what’s actually changed, what’s still unclear for families in Mumbai specifically, and what we’d suggest doing in the meantime.
Last verified: 10 August 2026, against public reporting cited below. Government rollouts like this can change quickly — please confirm current availability directly with your local health centre.
What’s Changed
Since early this year, Maharashtra’s Public Health Department has been rolling out a statewide, free, home-based palliative care programme — a real expansion from what existed before. Until now, government-run home palliative care in the state was mostly limited to cancer patients, and only in select districts. Under the new programme, eligibility broadens to include chronic pain and support for heart, liver, kidney, or lung failure, stroke, Parkinson’s disease, dementia, and childhood life-limiting conditions — not cancer alone.
The care model relies on ASHA workers to identify patients who need support, with community health officers (BAMS doctors or trained nurses) and Auxiliary Nurse Midwives making home visits as needed. There’s no cost to the family.
In early August, a Maharashtra Public Health Department delegation visited Kerala to study its healthcare system directly — Kerala has run a dedicated state palliative care policy since 2008, the first in India, and is widely seen as the strongest model in the country. Palliative care was named specifically as one of the areas Maharashtra wants to strengthen, alongside things like disease surveillance and public health lab capacity. Maharashtra already has its own palliative care policy, dating to 2012, so this looks like an effort to sharpen an existing programme rather than build one from scratch.
What This Means If You’re in Mumbai
Here’s the honest part: this programme is designed around Maharashtra’s district-level public health machinery — primary health centres, ASHA workers, the National Health Mission. Mumbai city runs on a separate municipal (BMC) health system, so it’s genuinely unclear from public reporting how directly this rollout reaches Mumbai households versus other parts of the state. We’d rather tell you that plainly than imply every family here can expect an ASHA worker at the door.
What we’d suggest instead: if your family is dealing with a serious illness and cost or access has been a barrier to palliative care, it’s worth directly asking your treating government hospital or nearest primary health centre whether they’re part of the National Program for Palliative Care and what home-based support they currently offer. Ask specifically — availability has historically varied a lot by location, and that’s still likely true during a rollout like this.
This doesn’t replace the NGO-run options we’ve listed in our Mumbai palliative and elder care resources guide — organisations like PalCare Mumbai and Romilla Care remain a reliable, well-established place to start, especially if you’re not sure where else to turn. Think of the government programme as a second door worth knocking on, not a replacement for the first.
A Note From Amardeep
I want to be careful here: a state government “exploring best practices” isn’t the same as a finished programme, and news coverage of a study visit tends to read more definitive than the reality on the ground usually is. I’ll keep an eye on this and update our Mumbai Resources guide directly if anything changes what’s actually available to families in the city.
Continue Exploring
This is part of our Mumbai Resources series. For the full directory of organisations and helplines, see our Palliative and Elder Care Resources in Mumbai guide. For the medical background behind palliative care itself, see our Understanding Palliative Care guide.
Sources: The Indian Practitioner (opens in a new tab); Maharashtra Public Health Department (opens in a new tab); Prokerala News (opens in a new tab).
A Note From Amardeep
I trained as a palliative care volunteer through Pallium India’s Volunteer Training Programme, and this blog exists to share what I’ve learned in plain language — because I remember how confusing and frightening these terms were before someone explained them to me clearly. I’m not currently offering clinical services; this is an educational space for families navigating serious illness in Mumbai and beyond.
More about Amardeep and this site →
Please also read our Medical Disclaimer before acting on anything you read here.
If this helped you know what to ask, there’s more where this came from. Subscribe for plain-language guides on caring for a loved one with serious illness, written from Mumbai for families anywhere. Know of something that’s changed since we last checked? Send it in — sam-bhava reads every one, even though it can’t offer individual medical advice.