Bad boy syndrome hits condom sale

Prashant Srivastava / TNN / Nov 4, 2005, 03:06 IST

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Modern metrosexual male is more sheepish while attempting to buy condoms than he was a few years back.

LUCKNOW: You may be astonished to know that the modern metrosexual male is more sheepish while attempting to buy condoms over the counter today than he was a few years back. According to a recent survey done by ORG-MARG, condom sales in urban India declined by 10 per cent from 530 million pieces in 2001-02 to 476 million pieces in 2003-04.
The condom market in India is 650 million pieces (excluding the free packs), of which 250 million is in premium sector.The market is growing sluggishly at two per cent over the last four years. Clearly, this is one area where mass advocacy has gone in the wrong direction.
Country head of the Private Sector Partnership (PSP) programme, running in tandem with the USAID-supported Condom Use Awareness Programme and a leading private sector bank, Anand Verdhan Sinha has attributed this fall to the 'bad boy image' now associated with the average condom user.
"Advertisements have been suggestive that condoms are associated with people who practice high risk behaviour. This also indirectly implies that one does not need to use condom with regular partners. Also, with increased awareness about the use of condom, the common man feels embarrassed while buying or using a condom.

There are some product related misconceptions also vis-a-vis condoms like they cause allergy, they burst easily, have a high failure rate or reduce pleasure and sensation," he said while talking to Times of India.
Supplying data on statewise condom users which is produced by the ministry of health and family welfare Sinha said that in Uttar Pradesh, per 10,000 unsterilised couples only 740 use condoms where as in Madhya Pradesh the figure is as high as 2,503. Here also Bihar ranks the lowest with only 53 couples practising safe sex.

The national average stands at 1,364. Sinha further reiterated that according to the National Family Health Survey-2 report, awareness about condoms was as high as 71 per cent amongst married woman while only 3.1 per cent reported using condoms nationally.
Interestingly, according to NACO-BSS (Behavioural Surveillance Survey), 80 per cent of man are aware of condoms and out of them 49 per cent used condoms with non-regular partners.
This trend is very alarming because of two reasons. One, the life style and morality attached to being unfaithful to your partner has undergone a paradigm shift in last few years for an average Indian and secondly the number of HIV infected cases has seen a sudden spurt too.
Citing the Durex Global Sex Survey (2004), Sinha claimed that now 20 per cent of Indians indulge in unprotected sex. Altogether 56 per cent of them are worried about HIV/AIDS. The frequency of sexual encounters has gone up to 82 times a year and most importantly now a single Indian is having on an average 3.7 sexual partners.
"This has lead us to a situation where today we have more than 5.13 million infected individual. More worrying is the fact that out of every four infected person, one is a female. This, when marriage and not promiscuity puts Indian women at the greatest risk of contracting HIV.
Many women know little about their husbands in arranged marriages and most wives are unable to insist on condoms use with their husbands. The rise in HIV among pregnant women increases mother to child transmission.
NACO estimates that out of 27 million annual pregnancies in India, at least one lakh occur in HIV positive women. This leads to an estimated 30,000 to 32,000 infected babies each year," Sinha summed up. True, it pays to practice morality.

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