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VI.  Conclusion

Children affected by HIV/AIDS face widespread discrimination in India, including in health care and in school.  Extended family members may refuse to care for children orphaned by AIDS, especially those who are also HIV-positive.  Many orphanages and other institutions test and reject HIV-positive children.  Children already facing other forms of discrimination—sex workers, children of sex workers, Dalit and low-caste children, and street children—suffer more.  Gender-based discrimination against women and girls significantly contributes to HIV/AIDS-affected children’s coming to need state care and support. 

The states and the central government have largely failed to prevent discrimination against HIV/AIDS-affected children or to provide redress once it occurs.  Only a few states are offering students the information needed to protect themselves from HIV and to avoid stigmatizing those living with HIV/AIDS; even schools that teach about HIV/AIDS do so at an age at which most students have already dropped out.  The government has neglected to provide out-of-school children, who are often the most vulnerable to HIV transmission, with this basic, lifesaving information. 

While HIV/AIDS, exacerbated by discrimination against people living with the disease, is leaving increasing numbers of children in need of state protection and care, the state is has neither recognized the problem or responded to it.  International law requires that institutional care for children be used as a measure of last resort and that children be kept in family-type care as far as possible.  However, India’s central and state governments, as a matter of policy, look to institutions as the first and virtually only solution for children whose families are unable to care for them.  Children whom the state fails to protect may be denied an education, pushed onto the street or into the worst forms of child labor, or otherwise exploited.

Human Rights Watch urges the Indian government to make discrimination illegal by enacting national antidiscrimination legislation.  It must also ensure that HIV/AIDS-affected children have access to education and all available medical care.  For the growing number of children whose parents, because of the especially debilitating nature of AIDS, become unable to care for them, the state must plan for their care by ensuring that existing institutions do not reject them and developing alternatives to institutionalization.


<<previous  |  index  |  next>>July 2004