IndiaPost.com - Petition urges India to provide healthcare for HIV/AIDS children

NEW YORK: The Stop HIV/AIDS in India Initiative (SHAII) has released a petition addressed to the President of India during a special event to commemorate the 58th anniversary of India's Republic Day at The National Geographic Society.

The petition urges the Indian government to fulfill its long neglected commitment to provide for the proper health and development of all of its children, especially Orphans and Vulnerable Children (OVC).

The petition calls upon the Indian government to ensure that 80% of HIV positive and vulnerable children are cared for by 2010 in accordance with the guidelines provided by UNICEF; strengthen the community based quality support to achieve the targets; and promote policies to explicitly protect public health medicines of national and international importance such as anti-retroviral drugs.

It was 58 years ago when a newly independent India pledged in its constitution to take care of its young people. Yet in a country where 70,000 children are infected with HIV and more than 1.2 million have lost parents to the disease, the pledge has been largely unfulfilled. Out of 70,000 children living with HIV, less than 3,000 are getting medical treatment.

And 21,000 are born with HIV each year through mother-to-child transmission for lack of services including access to preventive medication. Currently, much of the world's population affected by HIV/AIDS relies on generic medications produced in India.

At a time when there is a need to promote production of low-cost Indian medicines to bridge the gap between availability and need of medicines, India and other generic producers continue to face threats that place profit above public health.

The US government, supporting multinational pharmaceutical corporations, continues to pressure India to enact laws protecting intellectual property that will ultimately result in the demise of public health, particularly as a consequence of HIV.

"The Indian community's voice in (Washington) D.C. is not often heard. SHAII is working at a grassroots level in the U.S. and in India to try to fill this void and make the Indian presence in Washington more effective," said Dr. Mohan Bhagat of the Association for India's Development.

While UNAID's revised estimates of the number of people living with HIV released this year have created a lot of uncertainty at the grassroots level, the plight of India's OVC, a missing picture in this story, remains poorly documented and addressed.

Recently, the SHAII team undertook a five week-long mission to India to explore the in-country advocacy needs of OVC's in India. The tour included visits to grassroots level organizations in several states and the nation's capital. Based on this trip, SHAII, in partnership with Global Action for Children, will release a policy brief in April 2008.

SHAII, through these efforts, is working to catalyze an aggressive advocacy effort to ignite both a national and an international response in order to advance the well-being of Indian OVCs, specifically regarding their access to healthcare.

"Six decades ago, there was high hope that children would have better lives in independent India , but that has remained only a dream." said Vineeta Gupta, executive director of SHAII.

"With every passing day the number of street children and those sold into the sex trade is increasing, making these children more susceptible to HIV. At SHAII, we are working with International advocates to influence polices both in the US and India to fulfill these promises."