Aiding and Abetting AIDS

The AIDS pandemic has fast become a major problem in India, with the second largest number of cases in the world after South Africa, it poses grave danger to the country. Even though the cases are 0.2% of the population as compared to S.A, where the share is at 21.5%, the number still comes to 5 Million or so Indians infected. Even though the government has started to pay more attention it is far from accepting it as a major problem and the onus of providing help mostly falls on the NGO's. These organizations have been working hard to not only spread education but also gather proper data, which is highly important in understanding the pandemic in India.

Bill Clinton is in India right now to announce a program, which will train 150,000 doctors in treating AIDS (funded by his foundation). The Indian Health Minister announced earlier in the week, that the number of cases this year has taken a sharp fall as compared to last year. These numbers are supposed to be independently verified in the coming weeks. If this report is correct it would be great news, however the government in the past has always passed on numbers lower than the actual rate.
The government is not entirely dead on this issue, Indian scientists began clinical testing of AIDS vaccine a couple of months ago, so hopefully they should make some headway.

The other Bill helping in the fight against AIDS is the one from here (Seattle). The Gates Foundation has provided over $200 million over the past couple of years for programs in India. Many people may not like Microsoft, but Gates clearly is the biggest philanthropist in history, with over $20 Billion pledged in different programs the world over.

As greatly thankful we Indians should be towards these gestures, we also need to realize this its our problem as a society and only we can help ourselves in the end. Sex is very much taboo in Indian society even though our numbers clearly suggest we surely are an 'active' nation. Being a traditional society doesn't mean that we cannot discuss sex openly, nor does being open mean teaching the KamaSutra just because we came up with it. Indian pop-culture shows our confused state of mind, where family values as well as sex sells.

The first step in fighting AIDS is accepting it as a problem and talking about it, which is not an easy task even here in the U.S. But, we are the ones in the adverse position and we still keep digging ourselves in to the hole, the longer we take to overcome this first step.
This spread is not mainly because of illiteracy, ignorance is the main enemy here even among the educated. We surely have a long way to go, our treatment of rape cases and victims is one great example, its unbelievable that the nation's capital is one of the unsafest places for women in India. Treatment of women needs to be improved as in many cases the responsibility falls on them to educate their husbands regarding AIDS.
Another could be providing sex education in schools and colleges, in the long list of things that need to done. We really need to learn and for that we have great examples such as Thailand, where the rising threat forced breaking of social taboos which greatly curbed the number of infections. We really need to get our priorities straight.