MAPPING THE PANDEMIC

For HIV/AIDS in India, the first month of the year was a mixed bag.

Bad news: In the capital, the parents of a child contracted a hitman to kill their six-year-old HIV+ son, who had become infected by the virus during a blood infusion in a hospital. The hitman injected him with insulin in a taxi, but the cab driver caught on and informed the police. The parents couldn't live with the social humiliation of living with a son with AIDS.

Good news: The United Progressive Alliance (UPA) government's decision to take the lid off the subject of HIV/AIDS is a relief. Hollywood actor and AIDS activist Richard Gere said later on TV that Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's mere willingness to speak of AIDS "had probably saved two or three million lives".

That might be a bit of a stretch, but a Media Leaders' Summit (on HIV/AIDS), held at the prime minister's residence on January 6, 2005 proved to be life-affirming. Addressed by the prime minister, Union Information and Broadcasting Minister Dr Jaipal Reddy, Union Health Minister Dr Anbumani Ramadoss and Gere, a gaggle of Indian media organisations resolved to use their communications expertise and resources to "spread awareness and change the course of the epidemic". The government, on its part, has constituted a National Council on AIDS, headed by the prime minister himself.

The problem, as Hardnews, which was a part of the summit, found, actually lies in the Indian media's almost surreal insistence on linking issues with whether the coverage will financially pay off, thus downplaying the seriousness of the AIDS pandemic in India. Privately, of course, most media mavens will confess that it's too important an issue to be left to media accountants.

This is why Hardnews has decided to apportion a certain amount of its monthly reportorial wherewithal to covering the entire range of the AIDS pandemic — the agony and the courage of its victims, the virus' spreading vectors, medical advances in anti-retroviral therapy, genetic experimentation, government policy, funding…

So, our reporter went to Mathura, the watering hole of one of the most highly-vulnerable groups in the country — truckers. In and around this oil refinery, she ferreted out of the taciturn bunch that 19 people had been infected over the past 18 months and 10 had died, many in ignorance and agony, rendered mute by social stigma, most in such denial that they infected, in turn, their near and dear ones, most reduced to penury. If Mathura is a microcosm of the rest of India, we do India's citizens a disservice by not giving the pandemic the attention it deserves.

Among AIDS activists, it is a truism that if the disease is to be fought, the army of volunteer soldiers has to be as wide-ranging as possible — journalists, hands-on workers, social reformers, activists from high society to the grassroots, panchayats, women's organisations, the beat police. In order to encompass as much of the issue as possible, we have a senior cop amplifying on the role that the beat constable can play in AIDS control, and a high-society activist explaining what twist of faith brought her into the HIV/AIDS relief fold.

As matters stand, the future looks bleak: the National AIDS Control Organisation's target of achieving zero new infection rates in India by 2007 seems ambitious in the extreme. In short, it's not possible. But what is possible is spreading information like wildfire (which is half the battle won) — and this is where the media comes in.