SEX, DRUGS and DIGNITY - quick reflections

Since the early 1990's, the national AIDS response in India worked with the outlawed and almost won.

Those who inhabited this response, called it the ‘HIV movement of India’, now 25 years since it began a proud and reflective group of individuals and institutions.

There is real fear that the low overall HIV prevalence rates cannot be sustained if the change makers lose steam.

That condom use cannot continue to do the trick without dignity of those most at risk is evident to those privy to the process of change so far.

When the same National AIDS programme worked with pregnant women, it struggled for air.

The AIDS programme’s history is as much a history of institutions as it is of individuals habiting them. It is as much a history of change as it is a history of stagnation.

It is as a much a history of new learning as it is a history of stoic denial of new thinking.

While the programme achieved higher and higher condom use among hard to reach populations, it almost failed to ensure that this change is sustained by the dignity of the condom users, the target groups.

It is time to come together again. All those who care and all those who matter, need to assemble again, this time to tug at the fundamental transformational question of dignity.

No national programme in india has had the great fortune of having the best and brightest in the country galvanise at all levels to respond in a way that can only be called a ‘movement’…heaving at its own velocity.

The HIV response threw up parallel movements – each almost more potent than the other.

Leadership developed and bloomed – individuals more than institutions grew to find ways of implementing new ideas and take the necessary risks, push personal and institutional boundaries.

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