Bill Gates chatted with an HIV-positive patient Monday as he opened his controversy-laced visit to India, where he plans to talk business and give money to help fight AIDS. "Coming to India is valuable for me for both business and personal reasons ... it's a place where I believe we can make substantive efforts to eradicate diseases and help develop the health care infrastructure in a way that benefits millions of people," Gates said in an interview with Business Line newspaper.

Wearing the red Hindu "tika" mark on his forehead, Gates visited a nursing home for HIV-positive patients in New Delhi, where he sat cross-legged with resident Navin Kumar, whose pregnant wife is also HIV-positive. When Kumar's wife went to a government hospital to deliver her baby, "the hospital actually asked my wife to leave. They said it was useless to have the baby," Kumar told Gates.

Gates has walked into a controversy over the scale of India's AIDS epidemic. Government officials and health activists have rejected a US National Intelligence Council report that forecasts the number of HIV-infected people in India will rise to 20-25 million by 2010 from about 4 million now. Health Minister Shatrughan Sinha on Friday described the projections, which Gates cited, as "completely inaccurate." The government does not expect a dramatic increase in cases in 2010, claiming its AIDS prevention programs are paying off and that the number of HIV/AIDS cases has stabilized to between 3.5 million and 4 million -- 0.7 percent of its adult population -- over the last three years.

In a Saturday New York Times editorial, Gates wrote that India was "well on its way to becoming a global economic power." However, much of this progress could be thwarted by AIDS, he wrote, quoting the US government report. It is a view criticized by AIDS prevention workers in India, who accused Gates of siding with a report that they say lacks evidence and may distort national policies.

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