24. HIV Epidemic: Global Response and India’s Policy

HIV Epidemic is one of the deadliest health problems that has unleashed in the developing countries. Truly a harbinger of the global public health debacle after the globalization process, the disease has called for an unprecedented global response in the form of international aid on one hand and politico-economic anecdotes in pharmaceutical market on the other. This disease and its retort have brought in certain issues in economics like the fund allotment in prevention and cure, prevalence elasticity of private demand for prevention, the access to Anti Retrovial Therapy (ART) to the people living with HIV AIDS, the production and marketing processes of ART drugs in generic forms and above all the inefficiency of health systems in these countries. The paper analyses the global policy matrix to find that in the face of industrial capabilities and global politics, the huge international aid for this disease bypassed the need for care and treatment while concentrating on awareness generation among high risk groups leaving out the general population at large. The Indian policy contour is no different from this trend which neglects the basic principles of economics and medico-social setting of the country.