Inter Press Service - Tuesday, December 1, 1998
Dev Raj

To mark World AIDS Day, members of the NGO-AIDS Forum, a network of volunteer groups, gathered before the United Nations AIDS Programme offices here to observe a 'silent and peaceful protest.'

"When even our medical community remains unprepared and unwilling to work with HIV positive people, we can only expect society to react in a paranoid manner as the epidemic unfolds," said Siddharth Vatsyayan of the AIDS Awareness Group (AAG).

John Roegner, programme co-ordinator for the NAZ Foundation (India Trust) said hospitals and doctors in the city regularly turn away HIV patients. "They just don't want to see them and tell us they don't have the training, facilities or the beds."

"We hope the World Bank and UNAIDS will now look at the real issues and redirect funding," Roegner said.

Vatsyayan blamed the situation on poor monitoring by the World Bank of how the funds it provides to the National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO), a central government body, are spent.

The Bank provided 84 million U.S. dollars for a medium-term plan stretching between 1992 and 1997 -- all of which was utilised.

A new 'strategic plan' for HIV/STD/AIDS will dovetail into the country's Ninth Development Plan (1997-2002) for which the Bank has already pledged 300 million dollars but no ceiling has been fixed yet, according NACO director Prasada Rao. Under the plan, funds provided to NACO are to be used for providing an enabling socio-economic environment so that individuals and families affected with HIV/AIDS can manage their problems on their own with support from family and community.

The funds are also supposed to go into improving services for the care of people living with AIDS in times of sicknesses both in hospitals and in homes. But Forum members say nothing like that is happening and that the money is going to areas like information and communication. On Monday they demonstrated in front of the World Bank offices here, demanding close monitoring of loans and greater transparency and accountability by both the BAN and NACO.

"Clear time frames and goals have to be set for projects which must address the need for care and support of HIV-positive people," Vatsyayan said. According to Cedric Fernandez, Coordinator of Michael's Care Home, the only hospice for people with HIV/AIDS in the capital, NACO has failed to show tangible results for the money the it distributes.

"We are looking at a situation where people are going to be walking into hospitals with HIV as if they had caught the flu and there is nothing on the ground for them," Fernandez said.

Michael's Care home is now dealing with a new HIV patient every two days but has beds for just 40 people. Over the last year, 11 of its inmates died but it still gets no funding form NACO.

"We are now sourcing funds from the U.S-based, Catholic Relief Services which is very happy with our work - we have a one- on-one relationship with them," Fernandez said.

According to Fernandez, NACO officials have not even bothered to "come round and speak to us and find out what is happening - they are too busy with other NGOs with fictitious claims."

Such is the situation that SAHARA, the NGO under which Michael's Care Home operates, has had to file a public interest litigation in the Delhi High Court demanding that NACO be directed to measure up to what it was set up for. NACO also faces litigation filed against it by the Joint- Action Council of Kannur (JACK), another NGO, in the High Court of Chandigarh for the gross neglect of HIV patients in the neighbouring state of Haryana.

According to JACK's petition NACO's targeted approach on truck drivers, a supposedly 'high-risk' group, has resulted in the ostracisation of truck drivers with at least one of them dying of hepatitis being rejected by a government hospital on suspicion of having HIV.

Worse, the entire village of Chochi from which the victim came found itself ostracised as result of an HIV scare created by negative publicity while NACO simply watched on, JACK counsel has charged in court.

NGOs are also concerned that very little money is being spent on the development of a vaccine for the sub-type C of HIV which largely afflicts victims here. During a visit to India last month, Anthony Fauci, director of the U.S National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases , told Indian scientists that this country should "get moving in the direction of a vaccine".

But Pradeep Seth, who heads the microbiology department at the All-India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), said NACO has so far been indifferent to research projects.

"All the projects I submitted to NACO were rejected on technical grounds although at least one of them was later accepted by the Department of Science and Technology," Seth said. (END/IPS/ap-he/rdr/js/98)
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