JPG Magazine: Stories: Photo Essay: Gateway to Northeast India

Gateway to Northeast India - an AIDS hotspot

By Subhamoy Bhattacharjee

23 March 2008

Mobile Aids Awareness campaign in Gateway to Northeast India

A PICTURE STORY by SUBHAMOY BHATTACHARJEE

India's northeastern region is known to be a conflict zone with myriad insurgencies. But it is also an HIV/AIDS hotspot. The region comprises seven States. And two of them – Manipur and Nagaland – are among the South Asian country's six highest HIV-prevalence States.

The North-East accounts for 3.7 per cent of the country's population of 1,028,737,436 (2001 census). But the 2, 55,042 sq km region has around 38,134 People Living with HIV/AIDS (PLWHA).

In the high-prevalence States of Manipur and Nagaland, the HIV spread more through the needles shared by the Injecting Drug Users (IDUs) than by sex.

Guwahati is the main city of the State of Assam. It is also the 'Gateway to North-East' for rest of India. The AIDS Prevention Society (APS) – one of the many NGOs fighting the menace of HIV – focused on the city's highly vulnerable population when it implemented the Rajiv Gandhi Mobile Aids Counseling Services (RGMACS), a project of the Government of India named after one of the country's late and former Prime Ministers.

Guwahati is one of the most rapidly growing cities in India. It has experienced unprecedented spatial expansion and also steep rise in population over the past decades. The city is also getting gradually expanded to the northern bank of Brahmaputra and also to the south to the Ri-bhoi district of the neighbouring State of Meghalaya.

The city has witnessed rapid growth in population in last two decades and it now faces an acute shortage of suitable settlement areas and proper health care facilities in the urban slums, where majority of people are poor daily wage earning workers, petty traders or unemployed.

The APS' project coordinator I Pervez says that the RGMACS is aimed at addressing the problem of stigma and fear associated with HIV/AIDS in the underprivileged community through counseling. Besides, it is also intended to reduce the transmission of HIV through counseling on prevention and control methods of the disease, to provide HIV/AIDS education to senior school children of the community, to reduce the transmission of HIV through sexual route by encouraging use of condom and to manage the persons with HIV infected through early detection and timely treatment of opportunistic infections at appropriate level.

The APS planned to cover 50,000 people in each of the six large slums in Beltola, Patarkuchi, Hatigaon, Sijubari, Bhaskar Nagar and Bamunimaidam. A total of 300,000 people will be covered in a year.

The APS counselors have so far sent nine PLWHA for CD4 count and two others for Anti Retroviral Therapy (APS). They have also spotted four new HIV+ cases. A total of 80000 packets of condoms have been distributed among people in the six slums, says Pervez.

NB: The picture story shoot -submitted and presented during two days' long workshop on Strengthening Media Professionalism and the NGO-Media Interface in India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka for HIV/AIDS coverage held in Guwahati, India on January 4 and 5 of 2008. It was sponsored by the School of Journalism, College of Mass Communication and Media Arts at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, USA and the U.S. Consulate in Kolkata, India.