India looks askance at Gates' AIDS grant
By Ranjit Devraj
NEW DELHI - A US$100 million grant to fight HIV/AIDS in India, announced by the world's richest man Bill Gates soon after he landed in the national capital on Monday, has stirred controversy after policy makers voiced concern of a suspected hidden US agenda behind the largesse.
Speaking at a function - one of many scheduled for him on his busy, four-day itinerary covering the cities of Mumbai, Hyderabad and Bangalore - Microsoft chairman Gates said that the money was the "largest single initiative focused on a single country" by the Melinda and Bill Gates Foundation.
But many are skeptical, among them India's Health Minister Shatrughan Sinha who, speaking at a public function on the weekend, denounced US ambassador Robert Blackwill's attempts to promote US-led AIDS initiatives based on kite-flying projections that India would have 25 million AIDS sufferers by 2010.
Asked about the government's questioning of the AIDS statistics, Gates, during a visit to a voluntary agency where he met people with HIV, said what was important was the disease and not the figures.
Controversy has been building since last Wednesday when Blackwill quoted the figures from a report released recently by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He also referred to $63 million spent by the United States for containment of AIDS in India over the past five years.
According to the CIA report, the spread of AIDS in India, Russia and China posed serious threats to international health and the world's economy unless urgent measures, including vaccination, were taken to contain the disease in these countries.
In the report, the three countries - together with Nigeria and Ethiopia - are projected to outstrip sub-Saharan Africa in the number of people living with AIDS by 2010. The report says that an estimated 50 million to 75 million people could be living with the disease.
Volunteer agencies, led by the Joint Action Council, that work on human rights issues linked to AIDS, wrote to Sinha demanding that the government take a stand on the issue. In a pointed reference to projections made separately by Gates and Blackwill, Sinha said, "I fail to understand how people holding such important positions can stand on our soil and say that India will have 25 million sufferers of AIDS by 2010."
Sinha accused Gates and Blackwill of spreading fear in India about AIDS and said that he suspected that "false propaganda" was being used to help the interests of transnational corporations and people who were against India's "safety and security".
Possibly as a reaction to the controversy generated by the issue, Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee did not show up at a high-power lunch on Monday with Gates, who instead went to meet him briefly at his residence. Sinha, too, declined to meet Gates and flew to the bustling port city of Mumbai, where the former film star is partly based.
Earlier this year, the health ministry said that 3.97 million people were infected with the virus that could lead to AIDS. The figures, derived from a report by the ministry's Sentinel Surveillance Survey, said that the spread of the virus had been contained.
Meenakshi Dutt Ghosh, project director for the National AIDS Control Organization, said in a televised interview on Monday, "We have no idea how these [CIA] figures were arrived at ... going by the Sentinel Surveillance Survey, 10.9 million people could be suffering from AIDS by 2010."
In the past, the ministry has expressed extreme annoyance at figures released by UN agencies that differed from its own. For example, the ministry objected to figures released by such agencies in 2000 which said that 310,000 Indians had died of AIDS in India the previous year, but did not care to explain how that figure was arrived at. The figures were later retracted.
Said Dr C P Thakur, Sinha's immediate predecessor as health minister. "No agency has the means to calculate epidemiological statistics in this country or the authority to release them to the public."
But different international agencies have continued to cite other statistics on how many Indians are dead or dying from AIDS. "Every year we update our information and we are surprised to see other figures cited freely," Sinha said.
Gates said that the $100 million grant would be used for program that focus on mobile populations, such as truck drivers and migrant laborers who are considered to be at higher risk of acquiring and spreading AIDS.
Last year, Gates' foundation issued a $100 million challenge grant to the UK-based International AIDS Vaccine Initiative that has since signed an agreement with the Indian government to develop a vaccine to specifically target prevalent strains in this country.
In interviews given to Indian publications ahead of his tour, Gates declared that as with his software company Microsoft Corp, the key to his charity was the large number of smart people that were attracted to it and that had formed "partnerships".
Ethnic Indians form 20 percent of Microsoft Corp's engineering force and Gates said that this led him to have a special interest in India, a country he is visiting for the fifth time and where the company maintains software development centers.
To help cement this position in the country, Gates agreed on Tuesday to provide assistance of $1 million for the Media Lab Asia project of the government, besides extending $20 million for an e-learning initiative called "Shiksha". Gates made the commitments during an hour-long meeting with Communications and IT Minister Pramod Mahajan.
Mahajan had earlier explained the purpose and idea behind the Media Lab Asia project to Gates and expressed hope that with Microsoft extending assistance to it, more international funds would find their way into the socio-economic project. Under the Shiksha project, the Microsoft assistance will involve the training of 80,000 teachers, along with 3.5 million students, over a three to five year period. The project will be coordinated by the department of IT.
Asia Times