India's cases of HIV/AIDS shot up to 5.1 million people last year, putting it just below South Africa as the country with the most HIV-positive people, official figures said Saturday.
India recorded 520,000 new HIV cases in 2003, down from 610,000 in 2002, the state-run National AIDS Control Organisation said.
South Africa has 5.3 million people living with HIV or AIDS, or one out of every nine of its citizens.
The government said a drop in new infections in 2003 was proof that its anti-AIDS approach was working, but activists charged that the administration was again showing complacency towards the epidemic.
India launched its biggest anti-AIDS operation after announcing last year's figures, with the then-Hindu nationalist-led government speaking openly for the first time of the need to use condoms.
But anti-AIDS campaigners say the Indian approach is marred by a reluctance to discuss sex and condoms openly at the grassroots level.
The World Bank on Wednesday accused India and other South Asian nations of sweeping their HIV/AIDS problems under the carpet and warned that the region would be devastated by an African-like crisis unless swift action were taken.
But Meenakshi Dutta Ghosh, project director of the National AIDS Control Organisation, said India had successfully brought down new HIV infections with a multi-faceted strategy.
"We have been successful in telling people that HIV is spread through many routes, not only by having unsafe sex, and this has helped to eliminate stigma, denials and misapprehensions surrounding the disease in society," Ghosh told AFP.
"Our policies and programmes are keeping pace with the spread of the HIV epidemic in India. Our interventions for prevention have worked," she said.
"India remains a low prevalence country with an adult HIV prevalence of 0.9 percent of the total population - compared with South Africa where there are 5.3 million cases, which means 20 percent of the population," she said.
But Anjali Gopalan, executive director of the Naz Foundation-India, a non-governmental group working on HIV/AIDS, said the latest figures were of little significance considering the vast number of people with the virus.
"I'm worried that if the government says the numbers are plateauing off it will create a false sense of security which will be very detrimental to dealing with the epidemic," Gopalan said.
"I don't know how they're coming up with these figures. And a drop of a few thousand is not a drop per se," said Gopalan, adding she had seen a rise in new HIV cases through her work.
The government figures said rural Indians accounted for 59 percent of the new HIV cases and that 36 percent of the infections were recorded among women.