AIDS awareness ads cut, dept falls short of funds

The Delhi government has cut down on advertisements to raise awareness on the prevention of HIV/AIDS after the Centre slashed funds for the AIDS control department in the current financial year.

Free testing kits for sexually transmitted infections (STIs) will also not be available from this month at the clinics as there are not adequate funds.

“The projects are run by the state in collaboration with the Centre’s NACO (National AIDS Control Organisation). The state government has now decided to curtail Information Education and Communication of the control programme as we cannot cut down on other departments like providing condoms or kits for HIV AIDS,” said a senior official of the Health Department

“IEC has been identified as the non-essential element of the programme given the constraint of funds. There will be fewer advertisements appearing in the media. However, we will not compromise on the counselling of the high-risk groups,” said the official.
The other decision was to suspend the testing of SITs at the dedicated centres for the control programmes.

“The tests will, however, continue at the government-run hospitals. We clamped down on the SITs as tests for HIV/AIDS cannot be cut down on,” said the official.

With a tussle over funds between the Centre and the state over the release of funds for the target intervention programmes, several peer educators engaged by the NGOs are returning to sex work, as reported by Deccan Herald earlier.

Even though the officials claimed that the funds for the outreach workers and peer educators for a few months were released some time back, most NGOs said there have been no payments for over seven months now.

“NACO has made the payment routes so lengthy now that it takes a while for the salaries of the outreach workers to get sanctioned. So even if the workers receive the salaries of past months, there is always a significant time gap before the next salary is released,” said another official.

The ongoing projects have suffered a major setback with several outreach workers returning to sex work, the official added.