New Delhi, Feb 22 (UNI) Acutely aware that the silken smooth National Highways it is constructing are also becoming a deadly conduit for contracting HIV/AIDS by truck drivers, the NHAI has got into a mission mode to combat the scourge in all seriousness.

Away from homes for days together, truck drivers, operating their vehicles on National Highways, have become vulnerable to the terrifying prospects of contracting HIV/AIDS because of their reckless sexual practices.

Ignorance, illiteracy and long stretches of absence from home have emerged as the three major factors for truckers falling in the trap of the deadly disease.

Help is now on hand for the six-million-strong community of truckers, and it comes straight from the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), mandated with executing the National Highways Development Programme (NHDP) -- the showpiece of India's gigantic infrastructure development projects.

With money pouring in from the World Bank, ADB and IDBI, the NHAI has fashioned out a strategy of intensive intervention to combat HIV/AIDS by addressing the vulnerability of people and groups travelling along major highways.

The group sought to be covered under the project comprises temporary migrants like truck drivers and cleaners, female sex workers, brothel inmates, contract workers and dhaba (roadside eatery) workers, among others.

''The project is inspired by Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's stress on mainstreaming HIV-AIDS, an issue that now forms an integral part of the National AIDS Control Programme (NACP),'' Mr.

Vishnu Darbari, GM, NHAI, who is in-charge of the programme, told UNI.

Mr Darbari said the NHAI had set up a dedicated cell at its headquarters in Delhi to address the issue that had been threatening to spin out of control.

''If highways allow the traffic to glide smoothly, these also trigger and expand the reach of deadly HIV wherever these go,'' he said.

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