HIV/AIDS

Healthy Highway Project, Society for the Promotion of Youth & Mass (SPYM), Delhi, India

The project’s target group are the truckers who are a high-risk group for contacting STD/HIV/AIDS, due to their high mobility and the fact that they are away from home for much of the year. Through a needs assessment it was found that more attention needs to be given to the truckers sexual behaviour which is mostly unsafe and practiced along the highways making the truckers a vulnerable and high risk group. The overall goal of the project is to stabilize and reduce the prevalence of STD/HIV/AIDS among the truckers in all the above three highways in Northern India.

SPYM had initiated prevention activities with truckers on the Delhi-Jaipur (NH-1) and Delhi-Kanpur (NH-2) highways through its «Truck Driver Project» in 1992. Its intervention programme included information dissemination, condom demonstration and distribution and STD referral services to local STD specialists. Since 1997 SPYM has implemented a pilot project supported by DFID at NH-2 (Lal Kuan), NH-8 (Rajokari Border) and NH-1A (Narwal Jammu).

The projects main components are:

ﾀ Behaviour Change Communication (BCC); ﾀ Condom Promotion;

ﾀ Treatment/Counselling of STD/HIV patients.

Achievements of the healthy highway project:

ﾀ 65% of the truckers treated at the national level under the National Truckers Project, have been treated by SPYM at three clinic/centres;

ﾀ 400,000 people have been provided regular accessibility and availability of quality condoms at the project sites;

ﾀ Approximately 400,000 truckers participated in BCC sessions (Behaviour Change Communications) (One-on-one and in groups) conducted by the project staff of SPYM.