HIV+ people

UTTAR PRADESH now has its first network of people living with HIV.
The group, Positive People for Care and Support (PPCS), launched on World AIDS Day (December 1) last year, has 63 members. And, sixty per cent of them are women, aged between 30 and 40 years. Ninety per cent of these women have already lost their husbands to the deadly virus.
PPCS president Anil Kumar Singh, who was in Lucknow on Saturday and Sunday to attend a national consultation meet of the World Social Forum, told Hindustan Times that only 14 members had come out in the open; the remaining said they wouldn’t like their identities to be disclosed.
“In fact,” he added, “one of them, a woman, even addressed the media during the PPCS launch. She lost her husband a year back and her elder son six months ago to AIDS. Her second child, also a boy, is also HIV+.”
Singh, who is based in Kushinagar district, also became the organisational partner with AIDS Care Watch, an international campaign aimed at ‘staying alive with HIV’ until every positive person had an access to the anti-retroviral drugs (ARVs). (The campaign has about 100 organisational partners like PPCS.)
Singh, a law graduate from Allahabad University, said he was inspired to form a network of HIV+ people during his visit to Thiruvananthapuram in 2003 to participate in a national network of sex workers. “I had earlier been to Kolkata in 2002 to take part in the Anandostav and seen how people living with HIV lived life with dignity.”
He was in charge of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh for conducting a baseline survey of red light areas in the north India a few years back. During his interaction with sex workers in the two states, he came across many people infected with the virus.
“We had been fighting for the rights for sex workers. I realised why not work for the HIV+ people to get them some rights, too.”
PPCS, said Singh, is an attempt to provide care and support to people living with HIV and save them from getting stigmatized for the infection.