The Cabinet on Wednesday, October 5, approved amendments to the HIV and AIDS (Prevention and Control) Bill, 2014. This bill provides the right to get antiretroviral therapy (ART) to the patients suffering from HIV/AIDS.
This bill makes it compulsory for the Central and state governments to provide antiretroviral treatment along with treatment for opportunistic infections to the patients. Opportunistic infections refer to those infections which recur very often and take advantage of the weak immune system.
The bill also recommends to ban all acts of discrimination carried out by any person or the state against the HIV positive people as well as people who live with these AIDS patients.
The present government restored the bill, which was established by the UPA government during its last days. Finance Minister Arun Jaitley headed a meeting with a group of ministers (GoM) earlier this year in July and made various changes to the bill as stated by a parliamentary standing committee.
Meanwhile, two memorandum of understanding (MoU) were also granted by the Cabinet. One of them was on water cooperation between the European Union (EU) and India. The other MoU was about capacity building in rural development with the African Asian Rural Development Organisation, ANI reported.
