In the last session of the Lok Sabha, Minister of State for Health Dalit Ezhilmalai told the House that the cumulative number of HIV patients in the country was 79,574 and the tally of AIDS cases had touched 6,609 as of October 31, 1998. The word to note is `cumulative', which is critical in the case of HIV/AIDS because patients have been known to get the full-blown disease sometimes even after 10 or 12 years. So, this is not the number of people who acquired the HIV infection or developed AIDS this year.

That brings us to the bottom of the numbers problem. How do thesefigures square up with those quoted by the AIDS community, courtesy UNAIDS-India. According to these numbers, close to a million Indians were newly infected in 1997, which is approximately two infections per minute. But where are these new patients? By the National AIDS Control Organisation's reckoning, ``the HIV/AIDS epidemic'' should have tied down 15-30 percent of the 590,000 hospital beds in the country in 1995. Had it happened, our public health delivery system, which can't handle a dengue epidemic or a plague scare without going wobbly in the feet, would simply have collapsed.

The World Health Organisation, the mother of these scary numbers, insists that just 25 percent of AIDS cases get to be reported in a less developed nation like India. Even if we accept this to be the invincible truth, the revised total is still a modest 26,436, which is a fourth of the 99,341 new cases of leprosy detected just in Orissa in 1997-98, a fifteenth of the 364,723 new patients of cerebral malaria reported, again, fromOrissa, and a more negligible fraction of the 500,000 Indians who succumb to tuberculosis every year. Clearly, HIV/AIDS is one exaggerated health-care priority that keeps getting more attention, and more funding, than it deserves. Yet, the AIDS community goes on and on about the epidemic, spawning an NGO a day to pitch for NACO's Information, Education and Communication (IEC) pie, which was Rs 50 crore in the 1997-98 financial year.

The advantage of IEC, an abbreviation that has not gone out of fashion, despite being a development communications buzzword for about a decade now, is that it allows you to parent an NGO and get funding for activities that don't necessarily yield tangible results. To know how this works, all it takes is a careful study of certain figures tabled by Ezhilmalai in the Lok Sabha earlier this month. These are details of grants-in-aid released by NACO in the financial years 1996-97, 1997-98 and 1998-99.

In the current year, NACO gave grants totalling Rs 21.89 lakh (out of Rs 29lakh) to NGOs based in Delhi, which has just 1,282 HIV-positive people and 219 AIDS cases. The story gets more interesting when you come to the figures for the earlier two years. Of the Rs 162.8 lakh doled out, Rs 24.5 lakh went to just one art gallery in the Capital. And of the 47 beneficiaries in 1997-98, 29 were from Delhi and four from UP (where the HIV/AIDS scores are 1,282 and 119 respectively), compared to three from Manipur, which has the country's highest HIV/AIDS versus healthy population ratio, with tallies of 5,363 and 301 respectively. In 1997-98, again, telephone counselling outfits got Rs 14.52 lakh (a little over Rs 8 lakh going to one NGO in Delhi) of the total kitty of Rs 120.9 lakh.

But how many HIV/AIDS cases can telephone counselling prevent? Or for that matter an art gallery? Are there yardsticks that NACO uses to assess the use of the money it so generously dishes out? No wonder you see an explosion of socialite concern for HIV/AIDS and a proliferation of black-tie NGOs. After all,it's too much to expect Richard Gere to know what cerebral malaria is all about, or that TB kills an Indian every minute, and that these deaths are not related to HIV/AIDS in 98 percent of the cases. But then, without Richard Gere, how can you assure yourself social column yardage in your favourite newspaper? And how can you get the city's high and mighty to beg you to part with a free invite or two? HIV/AIDS, sadly, was the past year's greatest photo-op for the metropolitan shahtoosh set, and nothing more.

Not surprisingly, by the minister's own admission in Parliament, prevention indicator surveys carried out in Maharashtra, Tamil Nadu, West Bengal, Delhi and Haryana show awareness levels ranging from 54 percent to 78 percent in urban areas, and from 13 percent to 64 percent in rural areas. These are hardly the percentages you expect to see five years and a $84-million World Bank grant later, that too in non-BIMARU states with sound quality of life indicators. And if the consumption of condoms isto be the indicator, then there's a strong case for the abolition of NACO's IEC handouts. For, it has dropped from 1,253.47 million pieces in 1995-96 to 1,205.96 million pieces in 1997-98; the commercial sale of condoms has dipped from 239.35 million pieces to 203.81 million pieces between 1996-97 and 1997-98. Wasn't it meant to shoot up after all those campaigns for safe sex? In 1999, let's do the obvious. Let's convince ourselves that HIV/AIDS is indeed a priority. And if we do, let's learn how to spend World Bank assistance on people who need it.