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KOLKATA-At the edge of the kaleidoscopic outdoor bus depot that occupies several downtown blocks here, dozens of women in multicolored saris, some toting children, step into two well-worn buses this temperate January morning. It seems like a perfectly unremarkable sight, except for one detail: The women are sex workers from the city's Sonagachi red-light district. They belong to the Durbar Mahila Samanwaya Committee (DMSC), a quasi-trade union that today will bus them 200 kilometers for a 4-day retreat. In all, 800 people will attend to review the union's many programs, the most celebrated of which has kept the HIV prevalence in these women down to 11%. "With sex workers everywhere else, within 3 to 4 years, the prevalence has just skyrocketed," says Smarajit Jana, the epidemiologist who 12 years ago started what's widely known as the Sonagachi Project.
Jana, who left the project in 1999 and now works in New Delhi for the relief agency CARE India, holds what DMSC...