North East: AIDS, HIV and misery co-exist

[Guest guest]

AIDS, HIV and misery co-exist

Images of guns, drugs and rebels have long defined India's troubled

North-east. Now, a study across eight states in this resource-rich,

infra-structure-poor, conflict-scarred region seeks to highlight a

new worry: the rising tide of human trafficking ~ mostly women and

girls ~ and its potential for hastening the spread of HIV/AIDS.

India's North-east is home to 200 of the 430 odd tribal groups in

the country. The region is also socially and culturally distinct

from mainstream India. Along with Kerala, this pocket is the bastion

of Christianity in the country.

The seven-month long study carried out by the Nedan Foundation, an

Indian NGO working in the largely isolated region, was sponsored by

the United Nations Develop-ment Programme (UNDP).

" Poverty and conflict are fuelling trafficking in the northeastern

states. This opens up huge possibilities for the spread of HIV. It

is high time programmes address the problems, " Digambar Narzary,

head of the Nedan Foundation, said.

" We visited 25 relief camps of internally displaced persons (IDPs)

in Kokrajhar in Bodoland Territorial Council, Assam. Nearly 200,000

people are living in these camps without proper food. Traffickers

carry out recruitment drives in such relief camps. They make false

promises of jobs as domestic help in big cities, " he said.

An influx of migrants over the past few decades into North-east

India from neighbouring areas has sparked ethnic conflicts over

land, leading to demands for secession and political autonomy.

Many armed insurgent groups are active in the region and blood feuds

are common. In the last few decades, violence has ravaged the states

of Assam, Manipur, Naga-land, Tripura and Arunachal Pradesh. Ass-am,

Manipur and Tripura have also witnessed massive displacement.

Economic liberalisation launched in the early 1990s is yet to impact

on the North-east in the same way that it has touched other parts of

India.

Narzary noted that more than 100 young women have gone missing from

the camps over the past two years. Regional analysts fear that

such " missing girls " may have been sold into sexual slavery

or " temporarily married " ~ often a euphemism for prostitution.

The fear is that many such girls are extremely susceptible to

HIV/AIDS and that many have already been infected. " Young girls and

women from poor, desperate families are dually vulnerable: to being

trafficked into the sex trade and to catching HIV. But there are no

initiatives at present to address these twin problems, " Nazary said.

India now holds the second largest absolute number of HIV infections

in the world, UNAIDS has said. With more than five million people

living with HIV in the adult population in 2004, India accounts for

almost 13 per cent of global HIV prevalence.

Kokrajhar is one of several hot spots in conflict-ridden North-east

India. Since the late 1990s, hundreds of thousands of people have

been dis-placed in the region by regular clashes between various

militant and tribal groups.

Estimates of IDPs in North-east India due to prolonged insurgency

remain scarce. The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) said up to

200,000 people were displaced in 2003 in Assam alone and a further

15,000 in neighbouring Tripura.

But with little reliable research, the trafficking problem is more

widespread in the region than previously thought. Interviews by

Nedan's field teams with 60 teenage sex workers at Dimapur, a border

town in Nagaland, revealed that many of the girls had been

trafficked from the Naga countryside with false promises of sales

jobs in big cities.

Most of the girls were from broken families, having lost one or both

parents in the region's protracted ethnic con-flicts. Almost all had

dropped out of school and faced a bleak future, the foundation

discovered.

Sexual transmission is driving India's AIDS epidemic, according to

UNAIDS. This route accounts for approximately 86 per cent of HIV

infections in the world's second most populous country. The

remaining 14 per cent are through blood trans-fusion, mother-to-

child-transmission and injecting drug use, particularly in

northeastern states and some metropolitan cities.

Narzary hopes that the report's key findings, such as these from the

eight states, will spur the Indian government, as well as NGOs, to

come forward with initiatives to reduce the level of human

trafficking in the region and thereby lessen the spread of HIV/AIDS

in this troubled part of the country.

(This is a report by Plusnews, and does not necessarily reflect the

views of the United Nations.)

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