India, the country with the world's second largest population, has the world's third-largest number of people living with HIV.

This total comes to 2.1 million Indians. This total also accounts for four of every 10 people infected in Asia, said the United Nations in a report yesterday.

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According to the UN, India accounted for 51 percent of AIDS-related deaths in Asia in 2013 and eight percent of deaths worldwide.

At end 2013, over 700,000 people in India were on anti-retroviral therapy, the second-largest number of people on the treatment in any country. Unfortunately, 64 percent of those affected with HIV do not have access to anti-retroviral treatment.

HIV or the Human Immunodeficiency Virus is a retrovirus that causes the Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS). In AIDS, a progressive failure of the immune system permits life-threatening opportunistic infections and cancers to thrive.

Without treatment, the average survival time after infection with HIV is estimated at 9 to 11 years depending on the HIV subtype.

The prevalence of HIV among gay men and other men who have sex with men is between four to nine percent in India. In Chhattisgarh, the tenth largest state and one with the country's lowest health indices, the HIV prevalence among men who have sex with men is 15 percent, or three times the national average.

Migrant laborers are apparently more prone to HIV. Three in four women tested positive for HIV have husbands who travel far for work, such as truck drivers migrant laborers. In some states, nearly 90 percent of newly diagnosed HIV infections were among wives with migrant husbands.

Some  2.8 percent of sex workers in India are estimated to be HIV-positive. Data shows that women forced into prostitution are nearly three times as likely to be HIV-positive.

The HIV epidemic has killed 39 million of the 78 million people it has affected worldwide since it began in the 1980s, said the UN AIDS program.