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Tackling HIV/AIDS Stigma in India's Corporate Sector

14/10/09October 14, 2009

According to the National AIDS Control Organisation of India (NACO), 2.3 million HIV-affected people live in India. A third of them are under 30 and work for corporations. Many companies in India have decided to follow the International Labour Organisation Code of Practice on HIV/AIDS.

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India's corporate sector employs a majority of young people -- many of them contract HIV
India's corporate sector employs a majority of young people -- many of them contract HIVImage: APTN

When young people in India finish high school, many of them have easy access to a job in the corporate sector which provides them with an extravagant salary.

Breaking with tradition, many young people are not getting married. Many of them -- especially men -- even have multiple partners or visit sex workers. Experts say that this increases the risk of them contracting HIV significantly.

As the party culture is developing in India, so is drug use. Shared needles can also lead to people contracting HIV.

Social stigma attached to HIV/AIDS

There is still a lot of social stigma attached to HIV/AIDS in Indian society. Therefore, when people do contract the disease, they often do not admit being ill and do not go to the clinic for treatment. Many die without ever receiving proper care.

The ILO wants to raise awareness of the disease in mainstream society to ensure that ill people at least seek treatment and do not pass it on. It has introduced a code of practice to help companies develop strategies to protect employees with HIV/AIDS from discrimination at work.

Mohammad Afsar from the ILO explained that many corporations in India had conducted HIV/AIDS programmes in other parts of the world and wanted to implement them in India.

“Companies such as Pepsi, Standard Chartered Bank, Fab Miller were convinced and came to us for technical support, which we provided.”

He added that the ILO was “doing a lot of advocacy with companies that did not perceive the problem as that important and gradually they are becoming more convinced.”

“We adopted the code of practice because we believe in it.”

Many corporations have installed condom-vending machines in buildings to encourage their employees to take active steps to try to avoid contracting HIV/AIDS.

Harshita Pandey from the communications department at Apollo Tyres explained that although the ILO Code of Practice was not mandatory for companies, the company had “adopted it because it believed in it. The ILO has given support and helped build up the programme internally.”

Afsar said that the ILO was also working on implementing programmes in the public sector: “The Ministry of Labour has developed a national policy on HIV/AIDS in the workplace, which I think is a very important step as there are 20 million people are in the public sector.”

Activists hope that codes of practice at work and awareness campaigns will reduce the stigma attached to HIV/AIDS in India with time.

Author: Debarati Mukherjee
Editor: Anne Thomas