India: Group Shifts Its Focus in AIDS Fight

AIDS prevention programs in India often focus on prostitutes. However, on one late March Sunday in New Delhi, doctors placed the focus on customers first. At an open-air "Health Camp" day, doctors working for the local nongovernmental AIDS Awareness Group (AAG) attended to migrant workers, rickshaw drivers and other potential clients of the sex workers who populate the city's red light district on G.B. Road.

While the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation brings India's AIDS situation to Western media's attention, a host of smaller NGOs like AAG also have been struggling with more modest resources to fight HIV.

Michael's Care is a 35-bed AIDS clinic run by Sahara House in New Delhi. There, former heroin user Loon Gangte runs programs with funding by grants, tithes from staff's salary, and handicraft sales. Although he takes antiviral drugs, the clinic cannot afford them for patients. Another group, Healthy Highways, fights AIDS' spread along the roadside.

The Gates program gets high marks for being run by Indian people who are "pretty clued in," said Dr. Indu Jaggi who, with Dr. Duggan Shella, was in charge of the open-air health fair. But the Gates project does not operate in New Delhi's red light district.

Free condoms supplied by the Indian government get a mixed reception in Delhi brothels. So the two doctors routinely redirect their campaign to the potential clients in the street. Under one tent, cartoons depict HIV transmission. Simple line drawings offer a primer of risk. One cartoon uses the analogy of a sturdy oak eroded from within by termites to tackle the concept of AIDS as a chronic infection inside healthy-looking people.

A constable hovered nearby, but approved of the gathering. So the men kept coming to the health fair, which featured dhola drumming, music, theater and a magician. "It was a good day," said Jaggi, as the fair wound down. "We gave away three boxes of condoms. That's 6,000 exposures."

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