7th November, 2002
Ministry of Health & Family Welfare  


STATEMENT BY UNION HEALTH MINISTER ON HIV FIGURES


The Minister for Health and Family Welfare, Shri Shatrughan Sinha, made the following statement here today:

"We have come across press reports quoting alarming figures regarding prevalence and spread of HIV/AIDS in India. Having taken a number of initiatives and put in place many targeted interventions to generate awareness and to educate the public, we do not wish to contribute to unnecessary panic and alarm.

We have in India around 4 million people living with HIV. This is true. It is however, completely inaccurate to claim that India will have over 25 million people living with HIV/AIDS by 2010. We are updating each year, our data-set and information on the epidemiology and demography of HIV/AIDS. Accordingly, we are surprised by the figures being freely cited. I would request all concerned to share with us the details on which these estimations are based.

Nationally, the prevalence of HIV continues to be categorised as low. There may be pockets of high infection - six states of India have a generalised epidemic. In these states, there are also a few districts where there is only about two per cent prevalence of HIV/AIDS in the general population.

We are particularly mindful of the fact that the rest of the country with low prevalence of HIV/AIDS has high vulnerability on account of (a) lower levels of awareness (b) high migration to high-risk states for economic betterment (c) high levels of multi-partner sex/needle exchange (d) high incidence of untreated STDs.

The National AIDS Control Organisation is carefully targeting each of these aspects."