Re: The AIDS Scare in India

[Guest guest]

Dear forum members,

It is revealing that this articles come from the Convenor of the All India

Working Group on Health Policy, as it clearly reflects well the weaknesses

in India's health policy as a whole:

- the professional ignorance (or is it dishonesty?) that compares malaria

cases (mostly non-fatal, and curable), TB infections (latent, and curable)

and HIV infections (fatal and incurable), when these are very different

kinds of figures;

- the bureaucratic arrogance which maintains that HIV is not " a national

health problem " when the Leader of the Opposition, in the name of the

Prime Minister and all parties, has just joined the rest of the world at

the UN identifying it as a very serious health problem both for India

andglobally;

- the governmental greed that accuses NGOs of " looting " ;

- the nationalist inferiority complex that says that " this country's

HIV-AIDS programme is conceived, planned and implemented under the

guidance of foreign donor agencies and their so called experts " ;

- the political paranoia that describes the HIV/AIDS programme as " a

conscious but covert attempt to push India into an AIDS debt trap " ;

- the elitist contempt for people that fails to accept that 1.7 million,

3.7 million or whatever figure represents a huge, unacceptable number of

people condemned to chronic illness and premature death.

It is important for Indian policy-makers to recognise that the reason the

rest of the world treats Indian health policy with contempt is that it is

contemptible, as the article shows.

Sujaya Misra

E-mail: smisra@...