The savagery in the West Bengal healthcare sector continues unabated. And the worst is reserved for people diagnosed with HIV/AIDS. A 38-year-old man, Mr Arjun Debnath, living with AIDS in a North 24 Parganas village, has been harried about from home to one hospital after another with a degree of communal and medical brutality that is difficult to imagine in a civilized, or even a ?developing?, society. When his village got to know that he had AIDS, Mr Debnath was kept chained and tied up until the Barasat district hospital took him in. There he spent most of his days on practically no food, roaming around the premises for the lack of a proper bed. His wounds from being tied up and chained are still raw. He was then ?transferred? to the School of Tropical Medicine in Calcutta. This meant putting him ? medically unattended, with only some helplessly illiterate family members ? in an ambulance the driver of which was out to fleece him. There were no proper medical instructions accompanying him, and the Barasat hospital had not properly notified the one in Calcutta. Mr Debnath was left to his own devices at the Calcutta hospital, where he was ultimately unable to get a bed, and nobody cared to look at his papers. Neither the Barasat staff nor the ones in Calcutta have taken any responsibility for this mismanagement. He returned to his village using local trains and buses, and is now at home where he is bound to face another kind of ostracization from the people who had insisted on keeping him tied up and chained.

Quite apart from what this incident says about the general backwardness of Indian society in general when it comes to supposedly ?infectious? diseases like AIDS and leprosy, West Bengal?s medical unpreparedness for the HIV/AIDS crisis remains shocking. The particular lesson to be learnt from Mr Debnath?s case ? although who ought to be learning it is unclear ? is that most of the HIV/AIDS ?awareness? remains confined to urban India, both at the medical and the lay persons? levels. The districts and villages ? their inhabitants and hospital staff (if there are any) ? remain worse than primitive in their ignorance and prejudice regarding HIV/AIDS. The rural healthcare scenario in Bengal is, in any case, less than rudimentary. But when it comes to HIV/ AIDS, the medievalism becomes absolute.