Years after it was first mooted, the HIV/AIDS bill that proposes to protect the rights of affected people seems to be gathering dust. The draft of the bill was finalised first in the year 2006.
However, following suggestions from the law ministry, the department of AIDS control had in 2012 prepared a revised draft of the bill and the draft Cabinet note was sent to the ministry of law and justice for vetting. More than a year later, the reply from the law ministry on the draft bill is still “awaited”.
The draft bill in fact has been gathering dust for long as in 2009 too, the law ministry reportedly truncated some 32 provisions of the proposed bill and sent it to the health ministry. This led to protests by NGOs, following which the law ministry in November 2009 asked the then solicitor-general to look into the draft bill. The solicitor-general reinstated “several important provisions, and retained 23 of the provisions that were truncated earlier.
Earlier, several MPs, including Thomas Sangma, Neeraj Shekhar, Lalit Mohan Suklabaidya, Jyoti Mirdha, C.L. Ruala and Rajendra Singh Rana also asked the Prime Minister to intervene to speed up the bill following which the Prime Minister’s Office too shot off the letter to the AIDS control department. However, years after, the pledge to strengthen legislation and regulatory systems to fight the HIV/AIDS epidemic taken by the parliamentarians and senior bureaucrats is yet to make a headway.
In their recent report by the parliamentary standing committee, the committee also observed the long delay in introducing the AIDS bill in Parliament. The committee recommended that the department should proactively pursue “the matter for getting the bill vetted from the ministry of law and justice”.
Adding, that the “committee does not understand the reasons why it should take more than 10 years to finalise a bill when a decision was taken in 2002. The delay is not justifiable when the problem is enormous and India is the third largest HIV/AIDS affected country,” it said.