Brothel-based industry turns freelance, courtesy national AIDS programme

Brothel-based industry turns freelance, courtesy national AIDS programme
NANDITA ROY

MUMBAI, OCT 2: ``Hame koi bimari nahi hai. Ham log to sirf apne aurat ke pas jate hai. Phir ham rubber kyon istemal kare.'' (We have no disease. We only go to our wives (for sex). So where is the need for a condom?)

That was Gopal, 28, from Uttar Pradesh, one among the 10,000-odd truckers who park their vehicle at India's biggest truck terminus, Cotton Green in Mumbai everyday. More than 10 per cent of the truckers who come to Cotton Green are HIV infected. Gopal's attitude speaks volumes about the government's National AIDS Control Programme, now underway in Mumbai and much of the rest of India's high HIV prevalent states -- Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Manipur, Nagaland, Gujarat and Rajasthan.

At Kamatipura, Mumbai's biggest flesh-trade district, the AIDS intervention programme is having quite a different effect. As NGO volunteers spread the message of safe sex among brothel-keepers and their clients, prostitutes and their visitors are moving out of the area to carry on trade in unknown middle-class neighbourhoods of Mumbai. ``As Kamatipura's sex workers move out of the confines, more and more `socially acceptable housewives' are taking to moonlighting in the trade,'' says a NGO worker.

Result: From 20,000 sex workers who once plied their trade from Kamatipura, the figure has now come down to 7,000. What is more, for Kamatipura, business has never been as low as it is now. According to NGOs, till a year ago, on an average, Kamatipura's prostitutes would get at least four to five clients per day. Now, they are considered lucky if they get one in two days.

``The sex industry is seeing a major shift from being brothel-based to a freelance industry. A whole chunk of sex workers are now home-based, mainly housewives, and it is very difficult to identify them,'' says Alka Gogate, Project Director, Mumbai Districts AIDS Control Society.

The truck drivers of Cotton Green and the prostitutes of Kamatipura are two extremes of India's flourishing flesh trade that exposes the failure of the government's HIV-intervention programme, funded in heavy doses by the World Bank. And while no one involved in the campaign would admit this in so many words, the facts speak for themselves.

Take this for example. In Maharashtra alone, anonymous tests conducted in public hospitals reveal that up to 6 per cent of pregnant women in this region are carrying the HIV virus, up from less than 1 per cent a few years ago. While NGOs and fund managers like the World Bank are shouting from the rooftops that HIV-positive cases have reached an epidemic-like situation in India, the Government is busy compiling a feasibility study that it hopes would help frame a policy on whether an HIV test should be made compulsory for pregnant mothers.

``There is little we can do beyond informing these women that they have tested positive for HIV virus. The stigma attached to this disease forces them into a shell. Even counselling is a Herculean task. Moreover, the thrust of the programme is not so much on cure but on prevention,'' admits Santha Sankaranarayanan, Joint Director (Training and Surveillance) of the Mumbai Districts AIDS Control Society.

At Cotton Green itself, this correspondent was witness to a truckers' intervention programme where not more than 10 to 12, out of the 5,000-odd trucks parked at the time, were present to participate or even listen to the AIDS awareness programme.

The World Bank is spending $191 million on the Government's AIDS Control Programme to prevent the spread of the disease. Experts say the money would have been better spent had the Bank poured cash into research for low-cost HIV-control drugs, what with most HIV testing kits and drugs coming out from high-cost labs in the West.

With most HIV cases in the low-income and high-illiteracy bracket, any reliable treatment becomes out of reach for the average person, costing a whopping Rs 25,000 per month.

The Bank says it is directing its attention to a comprehensive AIDS treatment. But looking at the numbers, this effort may not be quite enough. In 1998 itself, there were four million HIV-infected patients in India, second only to South Africa. By early next century, India will have the highest number of AIDS cases in the world. Clearly, the time bomb is ticking away.