37th UNAIDS Programme Coordinating Board (PCB) Meeting
(26-28 October 2015)

Agenda Item 3: Draft UNAIDS Strategy 2016-2021

Intervention by India

Thank you Mr. Chairman,

1. India appreciates the open and wide consultative process adopted to develop the new draft UNAIDS Strategy for 2016-2021, in particular the efforts to engaging a diverse range of partners, including networks of people living with HIV, and creating greater synergy among relevant stakeholders.

2. We reaffirm the UNAIDS vision of Three Zeros and support the strategic directions and the proposed fast track goals. We consider the new UNIADS Strategy to be a comprehensive and ambitious strategy aimed at fast tracking global HIV/AIDS response with clear vision and goals taking into account the existing challenges and opportunities. We particularly appreciate the people centric focus of the document, which is reflected right in the preamble of the document.

3. The strength of the Joint Programme has been in creating a model where multiple stakeholders can come together and work cohesively towards a common goal and make a difference. We are happy to note that this has been carried forward in the new strategy giving greater emphasis to engaging and empowering key affected communities so that they play a critical role in designing and implementing effective rights based responses.

4. We support the emphasis on protecting future generations from acquiring HIV by eliminating once and for all new HIV infections among children, and by ensuring that young people have access to comprehensive sexual and reproductive health services that they need. We also appreciate the focus on young people, particularly young women, and the need for ending gender-based violence and promoting healthy gender norms. India welcomes the targets for stigma reduction and will work towards generating evidence to assess the progress. The proposed HIV/AIDS Bill will further strengthen this effort.

Mr. Chairman,

5. It is important that we do not loose sight of the unfinished agenda of the MDGs to reverse the trajectory of the AIDS epidemic and drastically reduce AIDS related deaths. Achieving the ambitious targets of 90-90-90 requires front loading of investments on a huge scale. More importantly, as many partners and commentators have noted, success hinges on our ability to scale up our efforts in ensuring universal access to prevention and treatment services including provision of affordable drugs. Addressing barriers to their access, including issues relating to intellectual property, trade and investment deals would be critical. We also need to tackle HIV comorbidites like TB and Hepatitis in a comprehensive and integrated manner. We are happy to note that some of our comments to highlight these issues in the draft strategy have been taken on board. We hope that UNAIDS will give sufficient focus on supporting Member States capacities to overcome restrictive IP and trade barriers and promote local manufacturing capacities for sustaining affordable access to medicines, diagnostics and preventive technologies.

Mr. Chairman,

6. We welcome the emphasis on catalyzing South-South, triangular and regional cooperation to promote knowledge sharing and expertise. We support the additional draft decision point submitted by African partners to highlight the role of regional platforms in implementing UNAIDS Strategy. At the same time, we wish to underscore that South-South cooperation cannot be seen as a substitute for North-South cooperation or the need to facilitate technology transfer to developing countries in critical areas of the HIV/AIDS response.

7. We would like to express our concern at the indicative list of indicators given in the annex to the draft strategy. Apart from the need to align these indicators with the global indicator framework for SDGs, it is important to avoid proliferation of indicators under the GARPR system and create unnecessary reporting burden on Member States.

8. Finally, we would like to emphasize the need to prioritize R&D efforts to come up with evidence based approaches, learn from each other through sharing of best practices, engage with the community and adjust our strategy accordingly to achieve our fast track goals.

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