Unable to bear the taunts of her colleagues, 34-year-old Sunita Patel, the AIDS-infected widow of a soldier in Gujarat, committed suicide.

Harka Bahadur Chetri, a burglar lodged at Kolkata's Alipore Central Jail, was starving to death because the jailor and remaining 18,000 prisoners were too scared to share their food as he was suffering from AIDS.
 

Patel and Chetri are victims of many myths that surround HIV/AIDS, an epidemic that has made India its biggest carrier after South Africa with around an estimated 5.1 million of the world's 39.4 million infected people.

South Africa, with 5.3 million HIV positive people, tops the list.

As the world marks the World AIDS Day Wednesday, India continues to battle the stigma, superstitions and mal-information that hurts the victim far more than any symptom of the deadly disease.

First observed among a few gay men in the early 1980s, the scourge has today claimed more than 3.1 million lives all over the world.

This year the theme for World AIDS Day is "Women, Girls, HIV and AIDS", given that the disease once seen as a white, homosexual syndrome is increasingly infecting women and children across the world.

"In India, our first challenge is to make people aware (of the disease). We have to dispel all false notions about AIDS, explain to them about how it is spread, and how to prevent it only then can we go about stabilising its growth," said S.Y. Quraishi, director of the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO).

This World AIDS Day, NACO kick-starts a rigorous campaign through posters, serials, songs, theatre and advertisements, aiming to spread "complete awareness" by July 2005.

Though India hopes to come to grips with the disease and stem its escalation by the year 2020, officials from UNAIDS, the UN's AIDS supervisory body, say the country has still a long way to go before it can achieve its objective.

India is not suffering from a single epidemic, but from a series of epidemics occurring in different parts of the country, according to the AIDS epidemic update for 2004 released by the UNAIDS and WHO last week.
 
"In Tamil Nadu, HIV prevalence was seen to cross 50 percent among sex workers, (meanwhile) in Manipur, the epidemic was driven by injecting drug use. (In some other states,) HIV has been rising steadily among pregnant women, most likely because the virus had been earlier transmitted to their sexual partners," the report said.

"(In India) available evidence suggests that prevention efforts in some of the states have done little to alter the epidemics' advance. Sentinel surveillance has revealed no significant drop in HIV prevalence among female sex workers, despite decade-old safer-sex programmes for sex workers here," the report said.

Peter Piot, director of UNAIDS, told IANS: "A lot of work might be done by small individual groups, but most of the programmes are either too scattered, too small or too short-term, to reach the large population."

This year, the government had included AIDS control in its Common Minimum Programme by calling HIV/AIDS "a priority", and assuring that funds would be allocated to it. 

Of the total enhanced outlay of Rs.22.08 billion ($509 mn) for the health department in 2004-05, Rs.47.6 million ($1.06 bn) has been allocated for HIV/AIDS.
 
Congress leader Sonia Gandhi will Wednesday join the British Secretary for International Development Hilary Benn for an "AIDS Walk for Life".

The government is also working on a new AIDS draft legislation likely to be placed in parliament next year. The legislation will seek to protect the rights of an HIV positive person, particularly right to confidentiality and security against discrimination.

The World Bank has released Rs.814 million ($18 million), the US Agency for International Development too has released Rs.118 million ($2.62 million) for AIDS projects in 2005.

Various international agencies are funding projects to battle the spread of HIV in India, but the authorities say the funding falls far short of requirement.

A report by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India has drawn notice to the fact that Thailand had been spending $1 per capita on HIV/AIDS.

"India," it said, "needed to strive to spend at least 50 cents, which would amount to $500 million."

--Indo-Asian News Service