United Press International - November 30, 2004
Harbaksh Singh Nanda, United Press International

India's southern state of Andhra Pardesh, which was a dry state not long ago, has made it mandatory for the liquor vendors to distribute one free condom with the purchase of each bottle of alcohol.

The campaign will be launched on Dec. 1, the world AIDS day.

The state officials have also enrolled more than 25,000 barbers as AIDS counselors, and the hair cutting saloons will also carry free condoms for the clients.

The barbers will counsel their customers on the dangers of AIDS and the importance of safe sex.

AIDS control Director K. Damayanthi feels that barbers can be very effective information centers as they engage in conversation with their customers on a daily basis.

A pilot project taken up in Hyderabad city, with 1,000, barbers yielded encouraging results.

Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y. S. Rajasekhar Reddy also plans to involve the religious leaders to disseminate the information about safe sex in their preaching. The state is also taking the AIDS awareness education to the school classrooms.

India is also introducing a female condom across the country to help women protect against sexually transmittable diseases.

Government officials say that nearly 80 percent of HIV virus infections in India are through heterosexual sexual relationships, and women are at least four times more vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases than men.

However the expensive condom imported from Britain may not reach the poor and underprivileged people who are more prone to the AIDS infection.

At least two Indian pharmaceutical companies had this month pulled the plug on world's fight against AIDS by withdrawing all its antiretroviral medicines from the World Health Organization programs, saying their medicines lacked the required teeth.

A U.S. official said that India must come out of the "denial" mode and accept the increasing incidence of HIV/AIDS in the country to fight the disease better.

"It is time for India to understand that the absolute number of AIDS patients in the country is very disturbing," U.S. Consul General in Calcutta, George N. Sibley, said Monday.

"Statistics are by no means universally reliable. There might be differences in the figures, but disease management is certainly a challenge," he said.

India is home to over 5.1 million people living with HIV/AIDS, and the number is projected to quadruple by 2010. South Africa, with 5.3 million HIV positive people, tops the list.

"In India, our first challenge is to make people aware (of the disease)," said S.Y. Quraishi, director of the National AIDS Control Organization. "We have to dispel all false notions about AIDS, explain to them about how it is spread, and how to prevent it. Only then can we go about stabilizing its growth."

Peter Piot, director of UNAIDS, told Indo Asian News Service: "A lot of work might be done by small individual groups, but most of the programs are either too scattered, too small or too short-term, to reach the large population."

India's neighboring Nepal is also a haven for the AIDS virus with poverty leading to rampant prostitution and illegal human trafficking.

Policy planners from seven South Asian nations are also coordinating a common approach to combat the rapid spread of HIV-AIDS virus in the region encompassing more than 1.4 billion people.

Health specialists from the seven nations have warned that the epidemic focus is shifting from Africa toward South Asia.
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