Gates Cuts A $100M Check To Fight AIDS In IndiaGates Cuts A $100M Check To Fight AIDS In India

Like any well-mannered guest, Bill Gates came to India with a gift for his hosts: He started his four-day trip through the country Monday by pledging $100 million to fight AIDS in the country.

The contribution, from the Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, is the largest grant that the foundation has given to a country to fight the virus.

Gates said his initiative would focus on women, because of their vulnerability to the virus and their lack of access to treatment in India. "In a conservative society, the effort would be to reach out to the women through other women and to ensure that the resources reach the women," Gates said, adding that the foundation was looking at programs that teach prevention methods that don't require the cooperation of a partner.

Gates said the foundation is funded by his personal wealth, which Forbes magazine estimated at $43 billion in September. "I realized about 10 years ago that my wealth has to go back to society," said Gates, a father of three who says he was influenced by his own parents' practice of regularly donating to charity. "A fortune, the size of which is hard to imagine, is best not passed on to one's children. It's not constructive for them."

Gates, who also met with Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, urged Indian leaders and health professionals to look beyond the stigma of AIDS and publicize its danger.

"HIV-AIDS is at a relatively low level in India and experience shows that countries that act at an early stage can prevent the disease from becoming widespread," he said.

Gates will meet with industry and government representatives in New Delhi, Bombay, and the southern software hubs of Hyderabad and Bangalore. He said he worried that India's enormous progress in IT--the country has the only Microsoft software development center outside the United States--would be thwarted by AIDS.

Thursday, Gates will visit sites in conjunction with the foundation's $25 million grant to the Partnership Project in Andhra Pradesh. The project is jointly run by the Children's Vaccine Program at the Program for Appropriate Technologies in Health and the government of Andhra Pradesh, the fifth-largest state in India. It's working in the state to increase hepatitis B vaccine coverage and strengthen the infant-immunization program.

The foundation's Global Health Program is focused on reducing global health inequities by accelerating the development, deployment, and sustainability of health interventions that will save lives and dramatically reduce the disease burden in developing countries.