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The health ministry sat on a $187 million international grant offered to the National AIDS Control Programme (NACP) for some 18 months, causing drug shortages that left about 1 million HIV-positive Indians treated under the programme without drugs and testing kits for at least five of those months.

The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria (GFATM), a multilateral funding agency that offered the grant, has written a 20-page note charging the National Aids Control Organization (NACO) and the ministry with endangering the lives of HIV patients across the country through the inaction.