Having lived in India at the time, I know that it was a disaster waiting to happen. It's hard to measure the impact of such a change because there's no A/B test

Having lived in India at the time, I know that it was a disaster waiting to happen. It's hard to measure the impact of such a change because there's no A/B testing (launch campaign in A city, but not in B city), but I don't think that was ever an option when you're dealing with such an epidemic. Like GP said, this is a book review, not a scholarly article. It doesn't have citations because book reviews rarely do. It is reasonable to expect a book to have those citations, and presumably this book does. > catered to a peak of appx. 0.02% of the population I'm not sure if you understand that sex workers make up a disproportionate share of the population that has sex with multiple people, at least in India. Not only that, the prevalence of condom usage among sex workers (and the population in general) was low at that time. This led to a high share of sex workers suffering from HIV and then transmitting that to folks who would in turn transmit it to their long term partners. Of course a lot of money was spent on campaigns for the general population too ("Puli Raja ki Aids vastunda?"), but it made a lot of sense to target this program at sex workers.