HIV and Aids can pose a serious economic and social development risk to countries in South Asia with about 2.6 million infected people, a lion's share of them in India, a new World Bank report says.
The report released Friday argues that, even if the overall prevalence rate is low (up to 0.5 percent), there is high and rising HIV prevalence among vulnerable groups at high risk for HIV infection, including sex workers and their clients, and injecting drug users and their partners.
Unless prevention programmes, targeting vulnerable groups at high risk of infection, are scaled up, these concentrated epidemics can further escalate, says the report, titled "HIV and Aids in South Asia: An Economic Development Risk."
Aids accounts for 1.5 percent of all deaths in South Asia and about 2 percent of all deaths in India. These numbers of deaths are comparable to the numbers from diabetes, tuberculosis and measles.
The report finds the impacts of HIV and Aids in South Asia on the aggregate level of economic activity to be small. For India, the effect on GDP (0.16 percent) corresponds to a one-off loss of about 1.5 weeks of GDP growth. However, the direct welfare costs of increased mortality and lower life expectancy are more substantial, accounting for 3 percent to 4 percent of GDP in India and Nepal, respectively.