AIDS AND CIVIL SOCITY: India’s Learning Curve

This book offers for the first time an inside view of NGO-led HIV/AIDS interventions on the ground. The NGO sector is the most visible face of civil society activism in India today, and NGOs have to date offered the most creative and comprehensive responses to the complex challenges of the HIV/AIDS epidemic.

Written as first-person accounts, the case studies in the book are candid in the way they discuss experiments and failures, frustrations and triumphs and, most importantly, learning curves in relation to both disease and society. Taken together, the stories bring alive some of the complex social and cultural issues surrounding HIV/AIDS in the country.

In a fundamental sense, the introduction, overviews and case studies in the book bring to the fore some of the most unexamined, unquestioned and resilient aspects of Indian social and cultural organization, i.e., the ‘social and moral order’, and the way society perceives and responds to challenges to this order.

Growth of an enlightened understanding about HIV/AIDS among the general public is an essential precursor for cogent public debate around the many faces of the epidemic and their linkages to larger, everyday economic, political and social issues. For, it is only when HIV/AIDS moves out of the margins and the realm of ‘the other’, and becomes everybody’s business and concern, that there will emerge a basis for the erosion of the terrible discrimination against those affected by the disease, and for public pressure for more effective policies for its control.

Radhika Ramasubban and Bhanwar Rishyasringa, are social scientists at the Centre for Social and Technological Change, an independent research group in Mumbai committed to generating knowledge about economic and social development processes, particularly as they affect the poor in the country. The group’s work has, over the years, focused on issues relating to food, energy, public health, drinking water, environmental sanitation and education.