NEW DELHI, Nov 9 (AFP) - The spread of AIDS throughout South Asia hinges on how well India manages its anti-AIDS programmes, the World Bank warned Wednesday.

"India is acting like a HIV (human immuno-deficiency virus) reservoir which, if it breaks, will cause havoc in entire South Asia," warned

Mieko Nishimizu, vice president of the World Bank's South Asia region, in an interview with the Press Trust of India.

The health ministry on Tuesday for the first time admitted that as many as 3.5 million Indians were carrying the HIV virus that leads to AIDS.

Nishimizu, who is touring India to review its AIDS control projects, said New Delhi was managing its anti-AIDS programmes better than other South Asian nations.

She said India was maintaining a proper data bank on the spread of the disease.

"In India, data on HIV prevalence and facilities to deal with the problem are available unlike other countries in this region," she said.

No figures on HIV were available in Bangaladesh, Bhutan, Pakistan or in Sri Lanka and surveillance and control mechanisms in these countries were also not as effective as that of India's, she said.

India took a 191-million-dollar loan from the World Bank in September to fund its five-year project to battle the spread of AIDS.

The health ministry report containing figures for the period up to mid-1998 said 1.4 million males in urban India were HIV-infected compared to 800,000 women.

The World Health Organisation has said as many as seven million Indians are carrying HIV. Others have put the figure at around five million.

Health ministry official Prasada Rao said the government had come up with a detailed state-by-state breakdown of infection rates to "sensitise state-level functionaries" to the magnitude of the problem.

The report gave 26 Indian states "high, moderate or low" risk exposure to AIDS.

The western Indian state of Maharashtra has the highest number of cases, followed by the states of Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka and Manipur.

West Bengal and Gujarat fall into the moderate risk category, while the rest of the country falls into the "low AIDS prevalence" category.

A deeply conservative country, India has had problems addressing many of the issues linked to AIDS, such as intravenous drug use and safe sex.

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