NEW DELHI, Dec 1 (AFP) - Thousands took to the streets across India Wednesday to mark World AIDS Day as the government announced a huge media blitz to make the entire billion-plus population aware of the pandemic in six months.
India, with an estimated 5.1 million cases of HIV/AIDS cases, is second only to South Africa in the number of infections and the government has been accused by health groups of dragging its feet over the problem.
But giving notice of a new approach, Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss told parliament that 1.5 billion condoms would be distributed countrywide accompanied by an intensive media campaign.
"We are going all-out and within six months the whole country should know about HIV/AIDS and its implications," the minister said.
Nationwide marches and rallies were staged by schoolchildren, health workers, recovered drug addicts and activists in major centres acrosss India, witnesses and officials said.
More than 15,000 people took to the streets in the southern technology hub of Bangalore where a UNICEF official called for an end to discrimination against women and girls living with HIV/AIDS.
Students, some in school uniforms and others wearing jeans and T-shirts, took part in the rally to the beats of bugles and drums.
According to a report released Wednesday by the Karnataka government, of which Bangalore is the capital, some 500,000 adults are living with HIV/AIDS in the state which has a population of 53 million.
The report said 1.5 percent of pregnant women in the state had tested HIV-positive at antenatal clinics this year.
"This is a high and troubling level of infection in a group thought unlikely to have engaged in risky sexual behaviour," said A.R. Nanda, executive director of Population Foundation of India, a non-government organisation which co-authored the report.
"High prevalence rates of HIV infection in this group signals that HIV has spread into the sexually active general population," Nanda said.
Michele Lot, state representative of the United Nations' Children's Fund (UNICEF) bemoaned the findings of the report.
"It shows the disease is spilling over to all parts of the state. Globally young women and girls are more vulnerable to AIDS. The discrimination against them must stop," Lot told AFP.
Rallies and marches were also held in India's remote northeast which borders the heroin-producing "Golden Triangle" of Laos, Myanmar and Thailand and has many intravenous drug users, a key cause of HIV infection.
People marched in Guwahati, the main city of Assam state. In the heavily Christian states of Nagaland and Mizoram, special prayers were held in churches and volunteers took AIDS pamphlets door-to-door.
The seven northeastern states -- Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura -- account for less than four per cent of India's one billion-plus population but are home to over 30 percent of its intravenous drug users, according to estimates.
In Muslim-majority Kashmir, seminars were held in three separate venues on HIV/AIDS -- for many in the conservative community a taboo subject.
At one seminar doctors pointed to Islam's strict rules against extramarital sex as a way to prevent AIDS. The mere mention of the subject prompted blushes among other participants.
Two years ago, the state government roped in Muslim imams and other religious heads in its campaign against AIDS. Many of them have taken to delivering Friday sermons on safe sex, a subject which had barely been discusssed in the privacy of the home let alone in public.
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