India’s ART programme is the second largest globally and has been acclaimed as one of the best public health programmes providing HIV care services. Continued determination for zero new infection of HIV, zero discrimination and zero AIDS related deaths will play a key role in achieving ending of AIDS epidemic as a public health threat by 2030.

The Government of India launched free ART initiative on the 1st April 2004 in 8 tertiary level hospitals across 6 high prevalence states and the NCT of Delhi. Since then, there has been a massive scale-up and decentralization of ART services with the aim of universal access to life saving ART for all PLHIV, along with lifelong retention and sustained viral load suppression. PLHIV have access to free diagnostic facilities; free first-line, second and third-line ART; prevention of parent to child transmission of HIV (PPTCT) services; prevention, diagnosis and management of opportunistic infections including management of Tuberculosis (TB) with daily anti-TB treatment through a single window approach. As part of comprehensive care, the national programme also provides psychosocial support and follow-up services, individualized thematic counselling, positive living and positive prevention services with appropriate referral linkages to various social beneficiary schemes. Currently, the free & lifelong antiretroviral medicine are ubiquitous and provided to 1.5 Million PLHIV through a network of 691 Antiretroviral Therapy centres and 1261 Link ART centres/Link ART Plus centres along with 319 care and support centres (as on December 2022).

The ART centers are mapped to 18 Centres of Excellence (CoE) (which includes 11 Adult CoE and 7 Paediatric CoE). In additon, there are 85 ART Plus centres at select teaching institutions for timely initiation of the second and third line of ART.

Care and Support for Children

In India, Children (<15 years of age) accounted for 5 %. NACP plans to improve this through early diagnosis and treatment of HIV exposed children; comprehensive guidelines on paediatric HIV care for each level of the health system; special training to counsellors for counselling HIV positive children; linkages with social sector programmes for accessing social support for infected children; outreach and transportation subsidy to facilitate ART and follow up, nutritional, educational and skill development support by establishing and enforcing minimum standards of care and protection in institutional, foster care and community-based care systems.

Operational Guidelines

S.No.	Title	Attachment File
1	National Guidelines for HIV Care and Treatment 2021	Download (11.11 MB)
2	National Technical Guidelines on ART_October 2018 (1)	Download (9.64 MB)
3	Operational guidelines of CSC	Download (11.63 MB)

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