Contents: Preface. Introduction/Radhika Ramasubban and Bhanwar Rishyasringa. I. Treatment and care for people with HIV/AIDS: 1. An overview. 2. The continuum of treatment and care: the YRG care model/Suniti Solomon. II. HIV/AIDS interventions at the workplace: 1. An overview. 2. Tackling HIV/AIDS in the industrial workforce: the efforts of prepare/Jude Stephens and Daisy Dharmaraj. III. Raising awareness about sexuality: 1. An overview. 2. A telephone help line for sexuality: the case of TARSHI/Radhika Chandiramani. IV. HIV/AIDS and women in prostitution: 1. An overview. 2. Organising women in prostitution: the case of SANGRAM/Meena Seshu. V. HIV/AIDS as a human rights issue and men who have sex with men: 1. An overview. 2. Client advocacy and service provision: The Naz Foundation's Mission/Anjali Gopalan. VI. Legal approaches to HIV/AIDS: 1. An overview. 2. Meeting the unmet legal needs of positive people: the lawyers collective HIV/AIDS unit/Anand Grover. Index.

"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." (jacket)