 | | POSITIVE CHANGE: Couples are likely to be fined if they do not submit their medical tests before the registration of their marriage | Pre-marital HIV test will be mandatory within six months. The study committee set up by the State Health Ministry in December has unanimously decided to introduce the proposal as a law.
Yesterday, 15 MLAs across political parties, an advocate and two doctors met and agreed to implement the test. “We will draft the law with the help of the NGO that initiated the process,” Bunty Patil, Independent MLA from Kolhapur who had raised the issue in the Vidhan Sabha in June 2007 told MiD DAY. Patil added that public hearings and awareness programmes will take place in Mumbai, Aurangabad, Nashik, Pune, Konkan and Vidarbha.
In the two-hour meeting, the committee discussed the social stigma attached to the test, human rights and stressed on educating school students about HIV. Dr Vimaltai Mundada, state health minister, told
MiD DAY, “We will decide whether couples will need to produce the medical certificate at the time of the registration of marriage later.”
Advocate Jaya Nair, representing the Maharashtra Law Graduate Association (MLGA), the NGO that filed the PIL (see box) in 2004, said, “We will extend our support in drafting the bill and implementing it.”
The PIL
On October 19, 2006, the Bombay High Court disposed MLGA’s PIL to make the pre-marital HIV test mandatory. In April 2007, the Supreme Court division bench of Chief Justice Balakrishnan and Justice Ravindran directed MLGA to take up the matter with legislators in the Parliament. Nair, the national working president of MLGA, met Chief Minister Vilasrao Deshmukh in May last year. | 
