AIDS and India: Funding its way to the forefront

Not very long back, a strange controversy engulfed the Indian health ministry prior to and during the Microsoft magnate's visit to the Subcontinent. The subject was HIV/AIDS and apparently Mr Gates had alluded to a CIA report in one of his widely circulated write-ups on the magnitude and the trajectory of the infection. Two reports, one of the National Intelligence Council (NIC), a United States government organisation, and the other by a private institution, partly funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, had predicted a large number of HIV/AIDS cases in some developing countries including India and China. Mr Gates had extensively quoted from the former report, which was titled 'The next wave of HIV/AIDS: Nigeria, Ethiopia, Russia, India and China'.  The next wave countries, the report noted, were likely to seek greater technical assistance from the US in tracking and combating the disease. For many it did not seem an irony that despite a being self-sufficient democracy and a sovereign state, India had in the new millennium to take counsel from corporate heads on how to manage and prioritise its health sector.

The NIC report also suggested that if an effective vaccine were to be developed in the coming years, Western governments and pharmaceutical companies would come under intense pressure to make it widely available. The two reports projected India as one of the biggest pockets of the infection by the year 2010; the NIC report put the number at 20 to 25 million HIV cases, the highest estimate for any country. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led government, which otherwise goes completely ballistic with jingoistic fervour on issues of cultural nationalism, found nothing amiss in these prognostications as long as they had not entered the public domain of discussion. Once they became known, much credit for this goes to a non-governmental organisation called the Joint Action Council, it became difficult to obfuscate the implications of such intelligence reports for any sovereign state. The union health ministry, under the charismatic Bollywood actor Shatrughan Sinha (who was recently relieved from his cabinet responsibility), issued a denial regarding the 2010 projections.