By IANS
New Delhi : India will invest Rs.115.85 billion ($2.8bn) to fight HIV/AIDS with a special focus on target groups in the next five years, health ministry officials said Friday.
As part of the National AIDS Control Programme – III (NACP-III), the investment would be made on heads like prevention, care, support and treatment, capacity building, and strategic information management.
"The NACP-III (2007-2012) seeks to halt and reverse the HIV/AIDS epidemic in India by 2012. During this phase National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) will strengthen capacity, formulate policy and guide implementation to enable a decentralised response focussed on local needs," NACO chief K. Sujatha Rao told reporters.
Rao said the programme would be implemented through preventing new infections in high-risk groups and among the general populace with scaled up intervention.
Of the Rs.115.85 billion, the government of India is giving Rs.80.23 billion and the rest Rs.35.62 billion will come from several donor agencies like World Bank, UNAIDS, Britain's DFID, Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
Of the total money, Rs.77.86 billion would be invested on prevention, Rs.19.53 billion on care, support, and treatment and Rs.9.1 billion on programme management. While Rs.3.6 billion will go for the strategic information management, another Rs.5.76 billion would be kept as contingency.
The fresh programme was announced on a day the government said the number of HIV/AIDS patients in India is now down to 2.5 million, less than half what was previously estimated.
The startling figures, released Friday jointly by the UNAIDS, World Health Organization (WHO) and National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) – the dedicated wing of the Indian health ministry to fight the disease – said that the national adult HIV prevalence in India now stands between 2 million and 3.1 million.
"We have taken an average of the most accurate prevalence data and underline that India is home to 2.5 million HIV infected people," Anbumani Ramadoss told reporters.
The estimates said that around 104 districts in India have a HIV prevalence of over 1 percent, and 29 have more than 3 percent. The Dharwad district of Karnataka is the most infected district in the country with a prevalence rate of nearly 6 percent against the national prevalence rate of 0.36 percent.
Within the intervention period, the programme would reach out to three million truckers and 8.9 million migrants to stop the virus from infecting the general population.
Truckers in India have an estimated HIV prevalence of 11 to 16 percent. There are more than 8 million migrants amongst whom prevalence is unknown.
The NACP-III will also aim to reduce HIV infection through blood transfusion from the current two percent to 0.5 percent within next five years.
Apart from targeting women who contribute 39 percent of the HIV infected people in the country, the programme would cover 75,600 HIV positive mothers with anti-retroviral drugs prophylaxis.