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However, things are beginning to change. With Global Fund support, government hospitals in major cities across India are rapidly scaling up the supply of free life-saving anti-retroviral (ARV) drugs. Public health services are basic, overcrowded and under-resourced. But, ARVs work and as more HIV/AIDS patients bounce back the message is clear; AIDS is no longer a death sentence. In Andhra Pradesh, home to India's worst HIV/AIDS epidemic, 10,000 people are now receiving ARVs, compared to just 200 three years ago.
The southern state of Andhra Pradesh carries 25 per cent of India's HIV/AIDS burden. Locals claim it is their famous hot chilies which fuel the state's expansive commercial sex trade. In truth, it's the ordinary twin burdens of poverty and illiteracy.
Nature bestows few favors on the tens of millions who eke out a living from Andhra Pradesh's red soil. Back-breaking labor in the cotton, tobacco and chili fields pulls in perhaps one US dollar a day. Some villages survive by crushing rocks in the searing heat, no water spared to damp down the dust. Summer brings daytime highs of 45 degrees celsius. Then there are the fields of despair; fallow roadside plots where poor women loiter at night offering cut-price sex to the steady stream of truck drivers plying the major trading routes. Uneducated girls who try their luck in the cities often end up in the same trade.
A month ago, 40-year-old Keshav found his way to a new Global Fund-supported care center, run by the Freedom Foundation. He was sick, broke, alone and 800-kilometres from his former home.
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