The Indian government has announced $326.3 million funding for the second phase of the country's AIDS control program between now and 2004. Although the first phase, which used an $87 million loan from the World Bank, ended in March without affecting on the country's AIDS situation, the Bank has more than doubled its loan to $191 million. The new project is also assisted by $41.5 million from the US Agency for International Development (USAID), $45 million from the British Department for International Development (DFID), and $10 million from the United Nations Program for AIDS (UNAIDS). The remaining $38.8 million will come from the Indian health budget.

According to National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) program director J.M.R. Prasada Rao, the new program is a "paradigm shift" in that it is completely decentralized from NACO and gives autonomous control to each state. And whereas earlier efforts focused on creating AIDS awareness, the new project will translate this into behavioral change in high-risk groups. Ten modern blood banks are being built and twenty are being upgraded. AZT prophylaxis will be offered to all HIV-positive pregnant mothers.

NACO predicts that by 2000, five million Indians will be infected with HIV, and AIDS deaths will reach more than half a million per year in 2010. But although the project aims to ensure that less than 1 in every 100 Indians in the reproductive age group is infected with HIV by 2004, this goal does not include the States of Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Manipur and Tamil Nadu where the prevalence is already as high as 2.4 percent. The goal here is to restrict the spread of the infection to less than 3 percent.

Finally, AIDS researchers who were promised $50 million for vaccine development (Nature Med. 4, 750; 1998) are disappointed, as only $1 million has been earmarked for this purpose.