Indian Prime Minister Says Country Needs to Pay More Attention to HIV Crisis
Other than South Africa, no other country in the world has more people afflicted with HIV than India. Yet so far tackling the AIDS epidemic has not been a high priority in that country. At an AIDS conference featuring 1,000 policy makers and activists, Indian Prime Minister Atal Behari Vajpayee promised that would change.
AIDS is spreading rapidly in India. In 2001, the number of AIDS sufferers in the country was under 4 million. A report released in July by India’s National AIDS Control Organization estimated that at the end of 2002 there were 4.5 million people infected with HIV in India. According to NACO director Meenakshi Datta Ghosh,
HIV/AIDS in India is not only confined to high-risk groups and in cities, but is gradually spreading into rural areas and the general population.
Like other countries, however, educating people about AIDS has faced opposition from conservative and religious elements in India. India’s current government is strongly Hindu-nationalist and members of the government have spoken out against AIDS education efforts. For example, Indian Health minister Sushma Swaraj has gone on record as saying that AIDS education ads should not feature condoms. Instead, Swaraj prefers an program of abstinence-oriented education.
India also faces the same sort of problems that other developing nations have run into — its people are so poor they can’t afford anti-AIDS drugs. Indian pharmaceutical firms openly produce generic versions of anti-retroviral drugs, but even the locally produced drugs are still too expensive for the vast majority of Indian HIV sufferers.
Sources:
Vajpayee calls for more political courage against AIDS epidemic. Elizabeth Roche, Daily Times (Pakistan), July 27, 2003.
Aids threat alarms Indian PM. The BBC, July 26, 2003.
The Indian Prime Minister Says Country Needs to Pay More Attention to HIV Crisis by Brian Carnell, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.