Should this 3-year-old be left to die?

Not so many years ago, Bikram took the long train to Delhi. At one-and-a-half years, he was tiny, with multiple skin infections, tuberculosis and severe malnutrition. Both his parents in Manipur were dead and Bikram was found on the road. The extended family wouldn't take him in and so Bikram boarded the train.
Right now, the three-year-old is kicking up a royal fuss.The prankster will not be parted from his favourite Spidey T-shirt. Bikram adores Spiderman and will only watch his comic hero's films.
And if there's anything he loves more than Spidey, it's food. Bikram does not remember his days of starvation. But the scars show up every time he sits to eat.
The skin infections are long gone, as is the tuberculosis. A robust youngster, it's a different Bikram now. But there is one thing unchanged. Bikram was HIV positive then, he still is.
He has now begun attending playschool. His teachers find him energetic, adorable. He talks nineteen to the dozen though when he was first received at the orphanage that is home to him, the little boy from the North East would not say anything for the first six months.
Bikram lives happily crammed into a bright home with other kids, the oldest 13, the youngest a gurgling eight month old. Each child has a big box bed with drawers, his prized possession. It's a happy world, but it is bursting at its seams. Because the Bikrams of this world have nowhere else to go.
Social workers wonder at how the NE region that has so long faced the scourge of AIDS, is still not sensitized to the need of HIV positive children whose parents have succumbed to the disease. The fear of stigma and the dreaded disease itself is universal.
Leading orphanages are unable to place children such as Bikram for adoption. Only recently, a Pune orphanage sent five HIV positive children over to the care home where Bikram lives.
Kalyani Subramanyan, of the Naz Foundation India Trust which has given Bikram his home, points to how the little boy did not find any care in the North East and had to travel all the way to Delhi to get a life. "We prefer home care to institutionalizing HIV positive children. But when both parents are dead, where does the child go?"
Funds are flowing into the country for AIDS prevention, but there is none for care. Anjali Gopalan, executive director of Naz says: "There is the perception of a lot of money coming in from the ilk of Bill Gates, but it is all tied up with prevention of AIDS. Care is not seen as a part of the same continuum. That does not make sense."
Anjali wants to know where all the enormous AIDS funds with the government go. "Since there is no funding for care, we've applied to the government. They don't even bother to respond."
So those already affected and left destitute have no takers from among the legions lending their names to the cause celebre. Some kindly individuals do hand over the odd cheque that keeps the Naz care home fires burning. But the money is gone soon. And there is scarcely any place for more Bikrams.
The common refrain: there is no return on investment. That in the context of charity translates to the fact that HIV positive Bikram will die sooner or later. Why pour money into care for him.
There have been overt suggestions that it seems more fulfilling to, say, give money to educate an orphan. He'll go on to use that education to make a better life. But Bikram does not seem to deserve a good life simply because he may die soon.
"When we approach corporates for funds for our care home for HIV positive children they ask, but how long will they live. I ask them, how do you know how long I will live," Kalyani says.
AIDS care workers say children on retroviral therapy are responding well and have every chance to grow into young adults, as is happening in the US.
Kalyani stresses that prevention and cure must go hand in hand. Because try as we may we cannot wish bare facts away.
India, with about 5.1 million AIDS infected people, has the second largest number of cases in the world, next only to South Africa. That is so many more innocent Bikrams coming into the world already infected and very few people willing to give them a better life.
(The child's name has been changed to protect his identity.)