Slated for 1 December, the World Aids Day, Highway in my Veins is not targeted against the truckers. Though the fact remains that much as they carry life-saving drugs and economy boosting cargo, they also carry and spread death in the form of HIV.

The show is a careful attempt to analyse why the situation is like this in India, explains Discovery Communications India associate director marketing and communications Rajiv Bakshi. It tries to spread as much awareness as possible about Aids and is Discovery's contribution to stopping the plague in India, he adds.

Statistics offered in the show, of which Bakshi spoke exclusively to indiantelevision.com, is numbing: most of the drivers interviewed by social psychologists who speak in the show say they have multiple partners, from 40 to 150 per driver.

But why this promiscuity? Or is this promiscuity, when a person's entire life does not conform to any acceptable social pattern?

There are 4.8 million trucks in the country and 14 million drivers, which means only one in roughly three drivers are employed at any given time, making life hard financially. So when the chance comes they go for it, and often they do not return for a year or more earning as much as possible.

Fourteen million drivers deliver 67 million tonnes of cargo every day, which is more than 70 per cent of the total cargo delivered in the country daily.

Dr Akash Gulalia of department of social studies, University of Delhi says that while the size of the trucks have remained the same, the load per truck has increased.

Truckers like Durga, himself an Aids patient, say they take opium just to stay alive so that the cargo can be delivered on time.

Says Durga: "Sleep is his biggest enemy on the road and it is one that lurks at every turn. They take opium and go on driving. Drivers can't help but consume opium to meet near impossible deadlines. They take opium and go on driving."

On top of all that, they are abused by almost everyone they come across: the Road Transport Officials, the people at the cargo haul point, owners of the fleet, police and everyone else, which becomes a huge stress.

Put together, these factors become some of the main factor behind accidents, and the rate of fatal accidents on the Indian roads is one of the highest in the world. A whopping ten per cent of road accident fatalities worldwide, over ten times that in Holland and the UK.

But these same factors also are responsible for the tendency to enjoy sexual life from whoever offers it, the waiting women by the road side.

Thus the highways are the breeding grounds of the AIDS epidemic.

Truck drivers rarely visit hospitals and instead seek the help of quacks and home remedies to cure sexually transmitted diseases.

A population services international survey of long distance truck drivers found that almost a fifth of them never used condoms.

Another 70 per cent preferred not to use these, and few drivers knew that HIV and AIDS do not have a cure, or that there is a difference between HIV and AIDS.

Gulalia says also: "Most of the cases in this country among the truck drivers go unreported because there's a lot of stigmas attached and the second thing is that the awareness among truck drivers, which has increased recently has to contribute in this because the awareness level is low, so people don't actually come up and show."

"Truck drivers face a lot of problems on the highways. I would say that their whole life is frustrating and say once you are into this profession it's, it's, it's a very, very frustrating profession because the kind of roads you are driving on, the kind of cabin you are sitting in, the kind of driving conditions you have."

"Studies have been conducted, you know, and looked into the sexual patterns in India and what we saw initially was that around 80 percent of the truck drivers reported that they are having multiple sex partners and that each trucker drivers had 40 to 150 partners in each year."

HIV positive trucker Surinder has been drving for the past 12 years, and he doesn't know whether it was the first unprotected sexual encounter or the last when he contracted HIV.

Today Surinder's wife is also HIV positive. They have two children who have not been tested for HIV yet. Surinder and his wife dread the results and prefer not to know.

Surinder says, "Sometimes drivers don't come back home for a year. They don't have any sense of belonging. Most of the time they live on the truck, on the roads…you get these girls on the highways… one gets tempted…one gives in."

"I don't want my son to become a truck driver. I don't want them to go through all the hardships that I have had to put up with."

Adds Durga: "I will not even advise my enemy to become a truck driver. There are just too many problems… we suffer too much."