LocationsIndia’s Journey to Change: HIV Rights and Inclusion
December 1, 2025
India's HIV response is reaching millions of vulnerable persons
Across India, help desks, community paralegal stations and online registration drives are bringing essential health and social protection services within reach for people who were long excluded. With support from National AIDS Control Organization (NACO) and state partners, these efforts are strengthening a national HIV response that now reaches millions—while helping build health systems that leave no one behind. Each completed form may seem small, but it reflects a quiet shift from exclusion to inclusion, part of a transformation years in the making.
Years before global frameworks called for legal reform, India had begun asking difficult questions. In 2009, with support from United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) and NACO, lawyers, activists, doctors and people living with HIV gathered across states to confront uncomfortable truths. Why were some people still falling through the cracks? How had laws meant to protect them, in practice, reinforced stigma and discrimination?
These early dialogues marked a turning point. UNDP supported the establishment of legal-aid desks in Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, trained paralegals and linked rights awareness directly to health programmes. People who once faced discrimination alone now had advocates and avenues for redress. The approach became a model for others, proof that when justice is built into health systems, access improves.
Two years later, Indian delegates carried those lessons to the Asia–Pacific Regional Dialogue of the Global Commission on HIV and the Law in Bangkok. Those exchanges, echoed in national consultations the following year, expanded India’s voice in a movement that saw health as a human right, not a privilege. By 2013, the voices from India of people living with HIV, transgender leaders, front-line health workers and grassroots advocates had become part of a larger regional conversation.
The stories they told, and the patterns they revealed, helped shine a light on how laws and policies could either open doors or close them tight.
In Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh, women living with HIV shared how hospital doors sometimes stayed closed. Men told how disclosure cost them jobs. Transgender women spoke of identity documents that did not match, and the silence that followed when they tried to access care or support.
The HIV/AIDS Act (2017) and the Transgender Persons Act (2019) set global standards for protection.
Each story became data. Each testimony, a policy case. And in 2017, these lived realities and advocacy efforts culminated in the passage of the HIV and AIDS (Prevention and Control) Act, 2017, India’s first law guaranteeing the rights of people living with HIV. Subsequently, in 2019, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 was enacted.
Once the laws were in place, implementation made them real. UNDP has been a proud partner in India’s journey to strengthen inclusive governance—from supporting the rollout of the Right to Information Act, to advancing the legal recognition of the third gender and supporting the development of rights-based frameworks such as the HIV and AIDS (Prevention and Control) Act, 2017, which was among the first globally to prohibit discrimination against people living with HIV. Similarly, the Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019, marked a significant step toward legal inclusion.
UNDP worked with state governments to weave HIV-sensitive social protection into planning systems, training officers to simplify paperwork, link health access with welfare benefits and recognize the specific needs of transgender and key populations. These changes reached the ground quickly: a woman receiving treatment could now access welfare without fear; a transgender worker could apply for housing support without being turned away. Outcome evaluations showed what people already knew: when systems are inclusive, treatment adherence rises and discrimination falls.
However, gaps remain between the law and its implementation, with communities particularly affected. That’s why UNDP continues to work closely with national and state governments to translate these progressive laws into practice—through capacity-building, community engagement and stronger systems that ensure no one is left behind.
The COVID-19 pandemic years brought new urgency to mental health concerns. Together with the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences, UNDP helped design LGBTQIA+-affirmative mental-health approaches, ensuring care that recognizes the whole person, not just the diagnosis.
Another persistent challenge for the Transgender community lay in securing formal identity documents that accurately reflected their gender identity. Without correct identification, accessing essential services like healthcare and welfare benefits remained severely restricted, effectively barring many from formal economic participation.
Without correct identification, accessing essential services like healthcare and welfare benefits become difficult for many.
“For many Transgender persons, getting an identity card is a long process, and by the time we get one, we lose any job opportunities that required us to get the ID card,” said Rani Tiwari, a Transwoman from Patna, Bihar.
UNDP, supported community-led groups to help transgender people secure digital ID cards through the national portal of the Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment.
What once took multiple visits and explanations could now be done online, privately and with dignity. For many, this was the first time their documents aligned with their lives, making everyday tasks like banking, employment and antiretroviral medicine refills simpler and safer.
At the same time, UNDP began connecting inclusion with resilience. A 2024 study on mitigating the impacts of climate change on the HIV response in India highlighted how floods, droughts and heatwaves disrupt treatment continuity, placing equity and climate resilience side by side on the policy agenda. That same year, UNDP co-supported the first Asia-Pacific LGBTQI+ Health Conference in Chandigarh, bringing those lessons full circle, issuing recommendations for gender-affirming care, pre-exposure prophylaxis access and discrimination-free youth services.
India’s journey shows that sustainable progress on HIV and equality comes not from a single reform, but from continuous dialogue between law and life, policy and people. UNDP’s role has been to keep that dialogue open: connecting evidence to empathy, data to dignity and governance to the grassroots. Because when people are seen, heard and protected by the systems meant to serve them, laws do not just change, lives do.
Related
content
content
