Rights Group Says Police Abuse AIDS Workers in India

Widespread police abuse of AIDS workers is undermining efforts to contain the spread of the disease in India, an international rights group said Tuesday. In a report released at the 14th International AIDS Conference in Barcelona, Human Rights Watch cited numerous cases of police harassment and violence against AIDS workers in India.

"The Indian government is shooting its own AIDS program in the foot," the author of the report, Joanne Csete, said of the government's alleged failure to protect those who reach out to prostitutes and their customers. Human Rights Watch said that police sometimes arrest AIDS workers on suspicion of being prostitutes if they have condoms in their possession, or detain them for questioning when they visit brothel areas. Some are beaten, the report said. About 4 million people in India, or 0.7 percent of the country's adult population, are living with AIDS, the government says. But some experts suggest the actual number is more than twice that and note that India, with over 1 billion people, is among the countries where the disease is spreading fast.

India's national AIDS program is funded largely by a $191 million World Bank loan, the terms of which include protecting the rights of high-risk populations. Several organizations in India have succeeded in helping prostitutes demand that their clients use condoms, said the report. However, workers from a voluntary organization, Sampada Grameen Mahila Sanstha, which distributes 350,000 condoms per month among prostitutes and their customers in western and southern India, were repeatedly harassed in recent months by police in the city of Bangalore. Police beat some of the workers, the group said. The report can be found at http://hrw.org/reports/2002/india2.

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