Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail (VVPAT)

Why in news?

• Opposition parties have been demanding complete (100 percent) counting of VVPATs to increase public confidence in Electronic Voting Machines.

About:

• Introduced for the first time in India in the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, VVPAT or the Voter Verifiable Paper Audit Trail is basically a ballot-less vote verification system connected with the EVM.
• The VVPAT generates a paper slip to be viewed by the voter and allows him/her to verify whether the vote was cast correctly on the EVM.
• The slip contains the name and symbol of the party they have voted for.
• The machine also has a transparent window for the voter to see the printed slip. Eventually, the slip goes inside a sealed box of the machine.

Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) Initiative

Why in news?

• Twenty years of Free Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) initiative have been  completed recently .

About Antiretroviral Therapy (ART) initiative:

• It was on April 1, 2004 for Persons living with HIV (PLHIV).
• It is the treatment of people infected with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) using anti-HIV drugs.
• The standard treatment consists of a combination of drugs (often called “highly active antiretroviral therapy” or HAART) that suppress HIV replication.
• Rationale behind the initiative: At the emergence of HIV/AIDS in the early 1980s, the disease was considered a death sentence and was met with a lot of fear, stigma and discrimination.
• Access to many medicines including the first antiretroviral drug, AZT (zidovudine), remained limited for most of the world’s population except in some high-income countries.
• Impact: In 2023, the prevalence of HIV in 15-49 years has come down to 0.20 (confidence interval 0.17%-0.25%) and the burden of disease in terms of estimated PLHIV has been coming down to 2.4 million.
• India’s share in PLHIV globally had come down to 6.3% (from around 10% two decades ago).
• The annual new HIV infections in India have declined by 48% against the global average of 31% (the baseline year of 2010).

Other Related Initiatives:

• There were many complementary initiatives which have contributed to halting the HIV epidemic.
• These include the provision of free diagnostic facilities; attention on prevention of parent to child transmission of HIV (PPTCT) services.
• Dolutegravir (DTG), a new drug with superior virological efficacy and minimal adverse effects was introduced in 2020.
• In 2021, India adopted a policy of rapid ART initiation in which a person was started on ART within seven days of HIV diagnosis, and in some cases, even the same day.
• The ongoing and fifth phase of India’s National AIDS Control programme(NACP) aims to (by 2025) reduce the annual new HIV infections by 80%, reduce AIDS-related mortalities by 80% and eliminate vertical transmission of HIV and syphilis.