New Delhi, Sept. 9: Migrant workers from Bengal and eight other states heading back to work after the Puja holidays this year might encounter lessons in safe-sex at railway stations en route.

India’s National AIDS Control Organisation has picked 15 districts in Bengal among 122 nationwide to reduce the risk of migrant workers picking up HIV at work locations and carrying it to their home districts.

“We want to roll this out within about a month so that we can reach out to migrants returning after Dusshera (and Puja) holidays,” said Aradhana Johri, joint secretary in Naco.

The new programme to prevent the spread of HIV through India’s migrant workers follows an 18-month exercise by Naco to identify migration corridors between districts with high and low HIV prevalence.

The 2001 census indicates that India has about 314 million migrant workers.

The programme will seek to provide migrant workers messages about safe-sex practices, the risk of HIV as well as other medical information through non-government organisations and trained volunteers at transit points such as railway stations.

Naco has identified 68 stations in the eight states as key migrant transit points — Asansol, Kharagpur and Jalpaiguri among them.

India has a low HIV prevalence rate of about 0.3 per cent. But surveillance studies have consistently revealed pockets of high prevalence — some of which are also destinations of migrant workers.

The Naco exercise has, for example, suggested that more than 300,000 migrant workers travel from Midnapore and North 24-Parganas to Mumbai. Orissa’s Ganjam district is a source of some 165,000 workers in Surat.

Surveillance studies also suggest that migrant workers may spread HIV in their home districts. A study of three migration corridors — Ganjam to Surat, Azamgarh to Thane and Darbhanga to Delhi — has indicated that some 70 per cent of HIV-positive men in the source-of-migration districts have a history of migration. “Behavioural studies show that migrant workers have the potential to carry HIV into their own communities,” said Johri.

The prevalence of HIV among migrants is the highest (3.6 per cent) after prevalence figures in other high risk groups such as men who have sex with men (7.4 per cent), intravenous drug users (7.2 per cent), female sex workers (5.1 per cent).

The new programme will engage NGOs or trained volunteers to disseminate information as well as small kits containing pamphlets and useful telephone numbers of counselling centres at their work locations.

While existing Naco programmes have reached out to high risk groups, including migrants at their work locations, this is the first programme to reach out to migrants in their own districts.