Around 20,000 HIV infected people to walk Kolkata streets on Saturday to focus on their plights in an open rally.

“Revelation of carrying HIV does’t help me at all. It is rather causing me a great hardship in every step of my life, even in getting the basic needs of life,” Kishore Kumar Shaw, who has been infected by HIV 15/16 years ago, told a news conference.

After being denied or rather forced to live a ‘secluded’ sort of life for having HIV for decades , Shaw took the initiative with his fellow HIV careers and launched Bengal Network of People Living with HIV/AIDS in short (BNP+) to focus their plights so that they receive some assistance from the society.

“We are hated like anything for no crime of us,” Shaw a resident of Kidderpore in south Kolkata told media persons yesterday.

Around 20,000 of about estimated 200,000 people living with HIV in West Bengal will gather at Rani Rashmoni Avenue, Dharamatala, tomorrow to focus their plights in the society and seek remedy, said BNP secretary Tarit Chakraborty, also infected by HIV.

He said “We will tell the people how hurdles our life is smeared withstigma, discrimination, violence, and negligence in the spheres of health, nutrition, education, shelter and property rights,”

A study says West Bengal has a concentrated epidemic among the most vulnerable sections like female sex workers, males who have sex with males (MSM), male-to-female transgender (TG) people, and injecting drug users. It has also 6956 children living with HIV (March 2012).

Chakraborty said “Most importantly the social environment continues to be discriminatory and violenct against people living with HIV.”

“Many of them in abject poverty and lack access to basic health and development services because of severe stigma and discrimination related to thier HIV status.

“Denial of education in schools continues to be a reality for children infected or affected by the HIV, and many women infected oraffected by HIV face property denial by their husbands’s families,” Chakraborty said for female sex workers and TG people living with HIV, health services access is a challenge as they face stigma around both HIV and their professional or gender identity.

The BNP has demanded the passing of HIV related bill introduced in Parliament in 2005, free homes for HIV infected women, enlisting HIV infected people under BPL, free pass in travelling rails and buses, unemployment allowance and basic rights to live like human.