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HEALTH: India Looks Askance at Bill Gates' HIV/AIDS Grant
By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI, Nov 11 (IPS) - A 100 million U.S. dollar grant to fight HIV/AIDS
in India, announced by the world's richest man Bill Gates
soon after he landed in the national capital Monday, has been mired
by controversy after policy makers suspected a hidden U.S. agenda
behind the largesse.
Speaking at a function - one of many scheduled for him on his
busy, four-day itinerary covering the cities of Mumbai, Hyderabad and
Bangalore - Gates said the money was the ''largest single initiative
focused on a single country'' by the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation.
But many are sceptical, among them India's Health Minister
Shatrughan Sinha who, speaking at a public function on the weekend,
denounced U.S. Ambassador Robert Blackwill's attempts to promote
U.S.-led anti HIV/AIDS initiatives based on kite-flying projections
that India would have 25 million AIDS sufferers by 2010.
Asked about the government's questioning of the AIDS statistics
cited by his foundation, Gates, during a visit to a voluntary agency where
he met people with HIV, said what was important was the disease
and not the figures.
Controversy has been building since Wednesday when Blackwill quoted the
figures from a report released recently by the U.S. Central
Intelligence (CIA). He also referred to 63 million dollars spent
by the United States for containment of HIV/AIDS in India over
the last five years.
According to the CIA report, the spread of HIV/AIDS in India,
Russia and China posed serious threats to international health and economy
unless urgent measures, including vaccination, were taken to contain the
disease in those countries.
In the report, the three countries - together with Nigeria and
Ethiopia - are projected to outstrip sub-Saharan Africa in the number
of people living with HIV/AIDS by 2010. The report says that an
estimated 50 to 75 million people could be living with the disease.
Volunteer agencies, led by the Joint Action Council (JAC), that
work on human rights issues linked to HIV/AIDS wrote to Sinha
demanding that the government take a stand on the issue.
In a pointed reference to projections made separately by Gates and
Blackwill, Sinha said: ''I fail to understand how people holding such
important positions can stand on our soil and say that India will have
25 million sufferers of AIDS by 2010.''
Sinha accused Gates and Blackwill of spreading fear in India about
HIV/AIDS and said he suspected that ''false propaganda'' was being used to
help the interests of trans-national corporations (TNCs) and people who
were against India's ''safety and security''.
Possibly as a reaction to the controversy generated by the issue, Indian
Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee did not show up
at a high-power lunch with Gates, who instead went to meet him
briefly at his residence.
Sinha too declined to meet Gates and flew off Monday to the bustling
port city of Mumbai, where the former film star is partly based.
Earlier this year, the health ministry said there were 3.97 million
people infected with the virus that could lead to AIDS. The figures,
derived from a report by the ministry's Sentinel Surveillance Survey, said
the spread of the virus had been contained.
Meenakshi Dutt Ghosh, project director for the National AIDS
Control Organisation (NACO), said in a televised interview on Monday: ''We
have no idea how these (CIA) figures were arrived at ... going
by the Sentinel Surveillance Survey 10.9 million people could be suffering
from AIDS by 2010.''
In the past, the ministry has expressed extreme annoyance at figures
released by U.N. agencies that differed from its own.
For example, the ministry objected to figures released by U.N. agencies
in 2000 which said that 310,000 Indians had died of AIDS
in India the previous year but did not care to explain how that figure was
arrived at. The figures were later retracted.
Said Dr C P Thakur, Sinha's immediate predecessor as health minister.
''No agency has the means to calculate epidemiological statistics
in this country or the authority to release them to the public.''
But different international agencies have continued to cite other
statistics on how many Indians were dead or dying from HIV/AIDS.
''Every year we update our information and we are surprised to see
other figures cited freely,'' Sinha said.
Gates said the 100-million-dollar grant would be used for programmes
that focus on mobile populations such as truck drivers and migrant
labourers who are considered to be at higher risk of acquiring and
spreading HIV/AIDS.
Last year Gates' foundation issued a 100-million-U.S. dollar
challenge grant to the U.K.-based International AIDS Vaccine Initiative
(IAVI) which has since signed an agreement with the Indian government
to develop a vaccine to specifically target prevalent strains in this
country.
In interviews given to Indian publications ahead of his tour,
Gates declared that as with his software company Microsoft Corp,
the key to his charity was the large number of smart people, that
were attracted to it and that have formed ''partnerships.''
Ethnic Indians form 20 percent of Microsoft Corp's engineering force and
Gates said this led him to have a special interest in India,
a country he is visiting for the fifth time and where the company maintains
software development centres.
''India is uniquely positioned to not only address its own HIV-AIDS
challenges and save millions of lives, but also to help other developing
countries with emerging epidemics,'' Gates said adding that India had fine
research capabilities.
''The initiative will also work to reduce and combat societal stigma
surrounding the disease,'' said Gates, referring to another
controversial topic that has surrounded anti HIV/AIDS programmes in India's
highly traditional and conservative society in which open discussion of
sexual topics is taboo.
Over the past two years volunteers working with HIV/AIDS programmes have
found themselves attacked by the public and even jailed under
anti-terrorist laws by police. (END/2002)
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