Siddharth Dube is a non-fiction writer and specialist commentator on poverty, public health, and development.

His books include In the Land of Poverty: Memoirs of an Impoverished Indian Family, 1947-1997; Sex, Lies and AIDS; and the central essay to photographer Sebastião Salgado's The End of Polio. He is currently working on a historical account of AIDS in India, to be published in 2009.

Dube was born in Calcutta in 1961. He studied at Tufts University, the University of Minnesota's School of Journalism, and the Harvard School of Public Health, where he completed his MSc in 1991. He has since been scholar-in-residence at Yale University's Center for Interdisciplinary Research on AIDS, and a long-term visiting fellow at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, Delhi. Currently, he is a senior fellow at the World Policy Institute in New York City, and convening member of the advisory board of FXB India Suraksha, a non-profit working with children affected by HIV.

Siddharth Dube has worked and consulted for the World Bank, UNICEF, WHO and other international organizations, most recently as senior adviser to the Executive Director of UNAIDS, the Joint United Nations Programme on HIV/AIDS. In 2009, he was a member of the UNAIDS Leadership Transition Working Group. He has been awarded research grants by the Ford Foundation, IDRC, and the US Institute of Peace.

Photo by Tom Pietrasik

Articles about Siddharth Dube 

The Week
As well written as any first-rate work of fiction.

Amitabh Dubey - REDIFF.COM
Siddharth Dube should be an unpopular man among those who anticipate a prosperous market-driven future for India, and especially with non-resident Indians who think he presents a negative image of India here in the United States.

Ashok Banker
I was impressed by his research, scholarship, and most of all, by his chutzpah in daring to write such a book in the face of government apathy at the AIDS epidemic sweeping the country (and the world).

Milwaukee Sentinel-Journal
Dube relentlessly catalogs the powerlessness of the rural poor, the sickness, the fear, the rigid customs and ownership structures that keep many peasants in a vise of poverty. And he pops cherished notions, showing us, for instance, that overpopulation is the result, not the cause, of poverty.

The Telegraph
A silent revolution brought on by a little known book written in English is sweeping through a small village located in the heartland of caste-ridden Uttar Pradesh.

Times of India
Writer Siddharth Dube is not in the business of peddling hope. But then, hope doesn't come easy when one is writing on a subject as stark as poverty, especially when you choose to tell the story of the poor in the voices of the poor.

Dilip D'Souza
In the course of researching his book Sex, Lies and AIDS, Siddharth Dube traveled all over India and met all kinds of people. The book has a lot to say about AIDS in India, and the numbers and prospects he runs through are frightening. Yet what left me far more disturbed than numbers were the attitudes he encountered.

International Press Institute, India: Experiment in Democracy [PDF]


The New York Times
''The world has enough money to do all those things,'' said Siddharth Dube, a health policy expert and the author of ''Sex, Lies and AIDS'' (HarperCollins 2001), a book critical of the Indian government's response to AIDS. India has the second-largest number of H.I.V. infected people in the world, after South Africa.

The world is in Goa, ask Lorca Mahalingam Pinto
Last week, Siddharth Dubey, an incessant traveler with an even more peripatetic mind left the confines of policy meeting rooms, think tanks, the stuffiness of the World bank and the United Nations and even his father’s forested hill side home on in Cunoor, to come, live and write in Goa.

India Abroad
India has to spend around 10 times what it does on prevention and it does not include treatment.

Gay Indians seek sexual equality
Siddharth Dube, a gay Indian who writes on poverty and public health, sees “an enormous world of difference” in the confidence of India’s young gay community compared with when he came of age in the 1980s. Then, Mr Dube says, he “felt terrified every day”.

Le Monde