NEW DELHI, Nov 30: India’s health minister defended on Wednesday government figures showing a 95 per cent slide in the annual growth of HIV infections after the UN AIDS chief called the numbers ‘plainly impossible’.

Speaking on the eve of World AIDS Day, Health Minister Anbumani Ramadoss said the World Health Organization had no quarrel with the actual methodology used to compile the number of people with HIV/AIDS in India.

“If you could accept the (WHO) figures for malaria, for TB (tuberculosis) which I’m sure you would, why can’t you accept the figures when it says there are 5.1 million (HIV sufferers) in India?,” he asked at a news conference.

Health ministry data released in May stunned volunteer groups working with HIV-infected people. The data said there were only 28,000 new HIV infections in 2004, down from 520,000 the previous year.

The figures took the total number of officially HIV-positive people in India to 5.13 million, the second highest after South Africa with 5.3 million cases.

Peter Piot, executive director of UNAIDS, said earlier in November while visiting the country of more than one billion people that ‘India having only 28,000 new infections is plainly impossible’.

Mr Ramadoss replied the ministry had not changed its way of compiling figures and said: “If there are any better modules around the world, please tell us.”

He added he believed India was ‘on the right track’ in raising awareness about HIV/AIDS infections in the world’s second most populous country where prejudice and ignorance have fuelled the disease’s spread.

The World Bank has said HIV/AIDS could become the single biggest cause of death in India unless prevention and treatment improved. —AFP