HIV/AIDS is quickly becoming one of the biggest public health challenges in India, threatening to emerge as the largest cause of adult mortality in India this decade. The Health Communication Partnership Associate Award (HCP AA) is working to stem the spread of the disease in Maharashtra State, home to nearly 50% of the known cases of HIV in the country. Using systematic, strategic and integrated behavior change with youth and other at risk groups, HCP AA supports the State’s vision of reducing HIV transmission and strengthening the civil and state agency response.

Thousands of HIV prevention messages spread across Mumbai, traveling not across the airwaves but in lunchboxes strapped to bicycles or literally carried to office workers. Using a centuries-old institution in India, the Dabbawala Lunchbox Campaign has created a highly visible, innovative strategy to disseminate kits about HIV prevention, stigma and discrimination. Approximately 5,000 dabbawalas pick up lunch boxes (dabbas) each day from homes and deliver them to an estimated 200,000 workers across Mumbai. The dabbawalas serve as both audience and channel for the campaign’s HIV messages. The campaign was supported by integrated print and electronic media, as well as high profile ministers and decision makers who donned red ribbons. The campaign, which was part of World AIDS Day interventions in 2005 and 2006, reached an estimated 100,000 office workers and 4 million Mumbaikars.

The Dabbawala Campaign is just one of the creative ways the Health Communication Partnership Associate Award (HCP AA) is reaching out to workers, youth and at risk groups in Maharashtra. The project also created the Jawan hoon, Nadan nahin (I’m young, not naive) youth campaign to increase risk perception and knowledge of HIV/AIDS, using television, radio, a comic book series, music videos and interactive games. Survey results showed 90 percent of respondents were aware of the campaign’s key messages.

The project is working extensively with other at risk groups as well, targeting commercial sex workers, intravenous drug users (IDUs), men who have sex with men (MSM), truckers and migrants. Project decision makers know these groups were fatigued with the same messages and materials on HIV. To combat this, HCP AA invited these groups to workshops to design materials and messages together. The workshops provided a forum for an exchange of ideas and tools. The result is the development of innovative, real-life stories and compelling messages told through street theater, puppets, and fictional tarot card readers.

Led by CCP under the Health Communication Partnership, the project is successfully using participatory approaches to tailor messages, create fresh interventions and employ behavior change communication (BCC) and advocacy to make an impact on India’s HIV epidemic in Maharashtra.