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India has had a sharp increase in the estimated number of HIV infections, from a few thousand in the early 1990s to a working estimate of between 3.8 million and 4.6 million children and adults living with HIV/AIDS in 2002. With a population of over one billion, the HIV epidemics in India will have a major impact on the overall spread of HIV in Asia and the Pacific and indeed worldwide.

Various programs are currently underway in India to educate commercial sex workers, truck drivers, and drug users about HIV prevention and the adoption of safer behavior in order to reduce the transmission of the infection to other segments of the population. However, little has been done to educate the incarcerated population in India.

To address this, India Vision Foundation has developed the Social Education and Health Advocacy Training Project, a client-centered participatory program that aims at increasing health awareness and preventive behaviors among the prisoners, with an emphasis on HIV prevention.

The program was launched at two sites i.e. New Delhi and Amritsar, with a one-day site-specific training session for more than 200 inmates and prison staff where the inmates presented key messages about health, HIV prevention, substance abuse through the medium of short skits/plays; poems written on the theme; speeches by inmates; folk songs and folk dances such as bolis/tappas and gidda dance by the female inmates and bhangra dance by the male inmates on the theme; kavishree (a form of folk music); shabad kirtan (religious hymns); religious discourses interpreting the teachings Guru Granth Sahib which promote fidelity, monogamy, and no addictions of any kind;  exhibition of their paintings on the themes and participatory games based on the concept of “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire.”

Today, the SEHAT project has a diverse team of peer educators some of who have not only started learning to read and write, but also to actively voice their concerns to the authorities and to stand up for themselves and their team.