By Nadine Oberhuber/Terraviva Europe Daily Journal, Monday, 15 January 2001
http://www.ips.org/index.htm

CHOCHI, India (IPS) - From the outside, the small grey house in this hamlet in India's northern Haryana state, looks peaceful and inviting.
    A brick path leads to the door covered with a fading green garland and a sign wishing the visitor a 'Happy New Year'.
    But joy is far removed from the lives of the inmates. Kaushalya greets visitors with a warm welcome, hot tea and biscuits, but her big dark eyes look sad.
    In the last three years, the 29-year-old woman has lost her husband and social life.
    ''They broke our lives four years ago,'' she says softly while other members of the family nod.
    The local hospital said that Kaushalya's husband died of AIDS. Doctors at the medical college in Rohtak city later explained that Kaushalya and her daughter too had tested HIV-positive.
    The doctors pressured Kaushalya, who was in her sixth month of pregnancy, to get an abortion because of her HIV-infection.
    ''By telling me a lie they made me lose my only son,'' the young widow mourns.
    But late last year, a second test showed that neither Kaushalya nor her daughter had the AIDS virus. Other members of the family too have since been tested negative for HIV.
    Like most Indian hospitals, the Rohtak hospital carried out only a single HIV test on her husband. In most other nations, at least three tests with similar results are required before a patient is confirmed HIV-positive.
    However, her family is still well known as 'the family of Chochi's first AIDS case.
    ''For years we lived with the trauma that the whole family was finished. But it all was a big fraud,'' says Kaushalya's father-in- law Mangaram Joon.
    Kaushalya's household was not alone in being affected by the 'AIDS scare'.
    For many people in India, the name Chochi has become synonymous with AIDS and the village was described in national media reports as India's first 'HIV/AIDS village.' Critics of the strategy followed by the government's National AIDS Control Organisation (NACO) say the affair exposes how it is generating fear rather than awareness of the dreaded disease.
    Kaushalya's 38-year-old husband Ranbir had gone to the Rohtak Medical College as a tuberculosis patient in April 1997. But because he was a bus driver by profession, he had to undergo a compulsory HIV/AIDS test.
    According to NACO's strategy, bus and truck drivers are one of the so-called 'High Risk Groups' who are among the most vulnerable.
    ''We were only told he had a terrible, incurable disease,'' recalls Ranbir's father. Kaushalya's husband died a day after they brought him home.
    However, public health activists who investigated the case disagree.
    ''His tuberculosis was in a treatable condition and could have been cured.
    But the hospital simply refused. The doctors were not even willing to transfuse blood on him which had been provided by Ranbir's brother,'' says a report prepared by activist groups.
    The residents of Chochi then found themselves in the grip of an AIDS scare.
    Top district government officials claimed that many of the 5,000 residents of the village too were likely to have HIV.
    A local newspaper even published the names of some 70 residents who were said to be suffering from AIDS. The paper reported that an untrained health practitioner had infected a large number of Chochi inhabitants by using un-sterilised injection needles.
    As Chochi became the centre of national and foreign media interest, authorities began sending teams of doctors every day to the village to encourage the people to undergo the AIDS test.
    ''The (District) Commissioner himself came and told us we were all going to die. The whole village was terrorised,'' says local leader Asad Singh.
    ''People from other villages began avoiding us and even our relatives in far away places, stopped coming to see us,'' he recalls.
    For more than three years, Chochi bore the stigma of an AIDS- village.
    Children in the village were dismissed from schools and colleges. Bus drivers refused to take on passengers from the village.
    The young men of Chochi are still turned down at local job interviews once they mention the name of the village.
    Arranging marriages too became difficult. In the joint household of Kaushalya's husband, three wedding engagements were broken off.
    The government's AIDS control organisation justifies the screening and compulsory testing of the High Risk Groups as a necessary precaution.
    ''It is assumed that the infection shifts from the high-risk population to the general population over a period of time,'' say NACO officials in the Indian capital.
    But human rights groups reject this argument. According to leading Indian rights activist Purushotaman Mulloli, NACO's strategy involves a ''clear stigmatisation of people.'' Rights groups and public health activists have complained against this before the law courts and India's National Human Rights Commission.
    The official AIDS-control programme has also come under fire for using unreliable statistics.
    Indian Health Minister C. P Thakur announced in November 2000 that HIV spread in the country had reached a plateau. But so far Thakur has failed to keep his promise made then to give updated figures ''within the next four weeks''.
    The latest NACO report released in December 2000, says: ''Although not much data is available at this point of time, generation of adequate data has been planned to assess the magnitude of the problem.'' According to the health ministry, 3.7 million people are living with HIV/AIDS in India. Only South Africa has more people with HIV/AIDS.
    Critics also question the national health programme's preoccupation with HIV/AIDS and relative neglect of other more urgent public health problems.
    Every second Indian is undernourished and 80 percent of the one billion people in the country lack regular access to medical care, says a survey sponsored by the Health Ministry that was unveiled early January.
    However, in the past few years, government spending on basic health care has stagnated at 0.7 percent of the Gross Domestic Product.
    The official AIDS control agency is now in the third year of the second phase of its programme that will run till the year 2004. This is backed by a 191 million U.S.-dollar loan from the World Bank and bilateral sources.
    The new phase of the NACO programme too will focus on High Risk Groups, health minister Thakur has declared. (END)

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