On Jan 13, 2014, India celebrated 3 years without a single case of polio caused by the wild polio virus, thereby meeting WHO's criterion for polio-free certification and becoming the last of the 11 countries of WHO's South-East Asia Region to do so.

On March 27, 2014, a meeting in New Delhi of the regional Certification Commission declared polio officially eradicated from the entire region, which will then join the three other polio-free WHO regions—of the Americas, Western Pacific, and Europe—leaving Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean to finish the job and cast the poliovirus into the same chapter of history as the smallpox virus.

The effects of conflict are disrupting polio eradicaton programmes and in Pakistan, the picture is quite different.