Disease as "Development:" Globalization and the Political Economy of HIV/AIDS in India.

HIV/AIDS is considered not only as the greatest global public health disaster but also as the biggest "development challenge" of the twenty first century affecting the most economically productive population and threatening development achievements in many areas. How HIV/AIDS as a disease entered in the development discourse making it the primary agenda of development in the Third World? How neoliberal globalization as a complex socio-economic, cultural and political process has shaped the discourses of development and HIV/AIDS in the developing countries? This paper explicates some of the complex issues surrounding the above questions and suggests that part of the answer lies in the way Third World countries have been historically produced through development discourses as "underdeveloped," and the way in which HIV/AIDS was later repackaged as the disease of the poor and a direct fallout of "development." Implicit in this argument, we use the notion of "discourse" of a disease that took place in the First World through which "truth" and so "power" was produced. By producing such truths, developed countries created a field of intervention over the developing countries through which "power" could be exercised. Thus HIV/AIDS as a development agenda is primarily Eurocentric that has been universalized through neoliberal globalization. Using an international political-economic approach to the study of disease and development, this paper explicates how the discourses of development and HIV/AIDS facilitated by a process of neoliberal globalization have affected the HIV prevention and care efforts in Third World societies with special reference to India. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]