SCENARIO OF HIV/AIDS IN INDIA AND BANGLADESH
About 5.7 million Indians were living with HIV in 2005, which indicated that there were more people with HIV in India than in any other country in the world (UNAIDS, 2006). However, the National AIDS Control Organization (NACO), which was established in 1992 in India, claims that the actual figure is lower. NACO conducted the HIV Sentinel Surveillance together with the support of two national institutes: the National Institute of Health and Family Welfare and the National Institute of Medical Statistics, ICMR, New Delhi. Over the years, the numbers of sentinel sites were increased from 180 in 1998 to 703 in 2005. This was expanded greatly for the 2006 surveillance, round to a total of 1,122 sites, to cover all the districts of the country. Based on the revised estimates, the total people living with HIV/AIDS (PLHIV) in the country are estimated to be 2.5 million. Out of these, 0.97 million (39.3%) are women and 0.09 million (3.8%) are children. The estimated adult prevalence in the country is 0.36 per cent (0.27%–0.47%). Among them, 88.7 per cent are adults (15–49 years), 7.5 per cent are aged 50 and above, while 3.8 per cent are children (<15 years). The proportion of infections among children and adults above 50 years of age has been increasing during the last five years (NACO, 2006).
According to the NACO (2006), India’s highly heterogeneous epidemic is largely concentrated in six states in the industrialized south and west, and in the northeastern tip (Map 3). The highest number of PLHIV is in Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, with nearly 0.5 million PLHIV each. Along with Tamil Nadu and Karntaka, the four south Indian states contributed 63 per cent of all the PLHIV in the country. Though Manipur and Nagaland have the highest HIV prevalence in the country, due to their small population size, the estimated number of PLHIV in these two states is around 25,000. Of the six high prevalence states, West Bengal, Gujarat and Uttar Pradesh have greater burden of the epidemic with more than 0.1 million PLHIV in each of these states. Similarly, the states of Kerala, Bihar, Rajasthan, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Haryana have around 50,000 PLHIV each though HIV prevalence in these states is low.