AIDS widows

Suman’s is not an isolated case, and there are many others like her in Bishnugarh who have lost their husbands to AIDS. Like 26-year-old Tara Devi whose husband, Mahru Yadav died on January 18 this year after working for five years in Panaji as a mason. Tara now stays with her father, Kishori Yadav in Alkopi village. Then there is Ramni Devi, 26, in Ramua village who, since her husband’s death, has been working as a daily wage labourer to feed her two children. Ramni says her husband died after he was ill for months since his return from Chennai in 2001.

All these women share a similar story. Faced with lack of employment opportunities at home, their husbands migrated to the cities to return home infected with HIV-AIDS. Poor and illiterate, these women don’t even know the disease their husbands suffered from. Tara and her father still do not know why she fell ill after her marriage in 2002.

‘‘God has willed it like this. Her fever and headache won’t go away,’’ says Kishori, who has turned to naturopathy to cure his daughter.

Fever and headache were the two symptoms that Suman says killed her husband.

Dayal Yadav, a school teacher who has known Suman and Tara, told The Indian Express their husbands were infected with HIV-AIDS. ‘‘They had told me that they had sinned by visiting the red light areas in the cities. From there, they probably contracted the HIV virus,’’ says Yadav. ‘‘Tara is also probably infected with the virus,’’ he adds.

About 4 km away is the state government-run Bishnugarh Primary Health Centre (BPHC). There are six doctors and more than a dozen staff manning the centre, but there is no facility to conduct the ELISA test to detect the HIV-AIDS virus.

Asked if he had ever treated the husbands of these young widows, BPHC’s Medical Officer S.N. Lal replied in the affirmative. ‘‘I have treated a number of migrant workers. Most of them were afflicted with HIV-AIDS,’’ says Lal, who has been posted here since 1987.

Hazaribagh District Immunisation Officer Atam Prakash Singh says HIV is spreading in the district. ‘‘I have no idea about the cause of the latest death in Bishnugarh but in that village and the adjoining areas of Barhi and Barkatha, there are many young widows. Many of the men there who worked as migrant labourers were down with HIV-AIDS,’’ says Singh.

To spread awareness about the disease, the state government has organised workshops at Bishnugarh, and BPHC workers led by Singh and Lal have gone door to door, distributing condoms. ‘‘In the past four years since the first HIV-AIDS death was reported in Bishnugarh in 1999, we distributed about 10,000 condom packets among the villagers for free,’’ says Dr A.K. Singh, one of the doctors at BPHC.

However, in Alkopi, none of the dozen men The Indian Express spoke to said they ever got the free condoms.