Forty years after the first case: The uneven geography of India's HIV success

BackgroundAs India marks four decades since its first identified HIV case, national indicators tell a story of remarkable success: prevalence, incidence and HIV-related mortality have fallen since the peak of the epidemic. Yet this aggregate picture obscures a quieter and more troubling shift - the epidemic that the National AIDS Control Programme was built to fight is not the epidemic it now faces.Key concernsThe residual burden increasingly reveals populations, places and gaps in care that national figures can mask: pregnant and breastfeeding women who acquire HIV after an initial negative antenatal test, States recording rising mortality despite substantial national declines, and people reaching antiretroviral therapy centres only after advanced immunosuppression. Drawing on the Technical Report released by the Government of India (2024) on HIV estimation and recent peer-reviewed evidence, this opinion piece argues that India's HIV response risks mistaking a slowing epidemic for a defeated one.ConclusionFour decades after the first identified case, India's next HIV response must be built around the epidemic it faces today, not the one that shaped the architecture of the national HIV programme in 1992.