The expertise of the partners engaged in the five cities project has been recognized by the State AIDS Control Societies. Partner agencies in each of the five cities have been invited by the State AIDS Control Societies to implement the government funded targeted intervention programmes. The project has increased the capacity of NGOs to implement new types of services. In turn, this has enabled the State Government bodies to release other available resources with the confidence that they will be well utilized.

Figure 3 shows that the size of the needle and syringe exchange activities of the five cities project were quite small. State funding will substantially increase the coverage of needle and syringe exchange programmes in the future. However, even with the initiation of these new State funded programmes, the coverage will still be well short of the coverage (of at least 60%) which has been provided in places where needle and syringe exchange programmes have been seen to be effective in controlling HIV epidemics amongst injecting drug users.

Figure 3.
Note: Different people attended the needle and syringe exchange programme each day. Hence the number of people accessing this service is more than the numbers shown.