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As loud music throbs in the air, Rohit Nag and his friends recline on steps just off the dance floor at the nightclub Elevate in Noida, a middle-class suburb of New Delhi. The 22-year-old Mr. Nag sports a thumb ring and four tattoos. His female companion, who works at the same call center as Mr. Nag, has a silver stud in her nose and another piercing her chin.

Young and free-spending, Mr. Nag and other workers at India's call centers are relishing social freedoms that their parents couldn't have imagined. They are also learning that a new lifestyle brings new risks and the need for precautions, especially amid the looming threat of HIV/AIDS. "Everybody knows you have to use a condom during sex," he says. "And when we get tattoos, we insist on disposable needles."

As India grapples with a growing AIDS problem, activists and industry executives have identified the country's 1.3 million call center and outsourcing workers as a surprising new risk group, alongside truckers, migrant workers and prostitutes. Predominantly young, single and mobile, call-center employees are away from the traditionally strict family life and partying hard when they are not working diligently.

As a result, some companies in India are establishing in-house programs to educate their workers about the disease.

"If you look at the way the pandemic in India is progressing, [call-center workers] are at risk because they are young and sexually active," says Emma Schmitt, spokeswoman for Standard Chartered Bank PLC. The London-based bank, which has nearly one-fourth of its 43,000 employees based in India, has targeted its roughly 6,000 call-center workers in Chennai for classroom-based AIDS education. Soon, HIV prevention messages will pop up on their workstation screens as part of an online refresher course.

A study in February of 2006 found that 11% of 1,100 workers at iEnergizer Inc., a call center and outsourcing business in Noida, India, have had more than five sexual partners. By contrast, 7% of 1,300 adults across the country said they had had more than five sexual partners, a separate study found.

The data speak to a dramatic lifestyle change in a society where parents often arrange marriages for their children and rarely speak to them about sex. Both surveys, the only such ones conducted to date, were done by SSL International PLC, maker of Durex condoms. The call-center survey was co-sponsored by Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, a nonprofit New York-based advocacy group, with iEnergizer's cooperation.

"We decided one thing we had to do was include in our employee induction a whole new chapter on HIV/AIDS so every new employee would be made aware of this disease," says Ashish Mittal, iEnergizer's vice president of operations. "We made it top management policy."

During an HIV/AIDS education fair earlier this year at iEnergizer's one million square-foot call center in Noida, 3,000 workers decorated their cubicles with AIDS charts, graphs, cartoons and slogans stating, "No one should die of ignorance."

Although the prevalence of HIV among adults in India is low, at less than 1%, India still leads all other nations with 5.7 million HIV cases, due to its enormous population, according to the United Nations' AIDS agency. South Africa, by contrast, has 5.3 million cases, representing 19% of the adult population. In both countries, the virus is largely hitting heterosexuals.

The Indian government has played down predictions of an exploding AIDS epidemic, particularly a forecast by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency that the virus could infect more than 20 million people in India by 2010. India's National AIDS Control Organization, under the Ministry of Health, estimates that at the current pace, India could have 6.3 million HIV-positive people by 2012. "That's if we do nothing," says K. Sujatha Rao, the organization's director general. "It's bound to reverse by expanding treatment and increased use of condoms." (Since the early 1990s, the organization has promoted the use of condoms, conducted AIDS awareness programs and improved clinical services.)

Richard Holbrooke, chief executive of the Global Business Coalition on HIV/AIDS, warns that the prevalence of the disease among young professionals could rise without diligent efforts. "We don't want India to end up like South Africa, where the overwhelming epidemic is dismantling the working population, and causing skilled professionals -- doctors, lawyers and engineers -- to flee the country," says Mr. Holbrooke, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

Left unchecked, AIDS experts fear the epidemic could seriously weaken economic growth in India, whose young, educated, English-speaking work force has become a magnet for multinationals establishing parts of their businesses in the country. In July, the U.N. published a report that estimated India could lose almost a percentage point of economic growth annually over the next decade due to AIDS.

Call centers aren't the only companies recognizing their workers are at risk and establishing AIDS-education programs for employees. Intel Corp. and Microsoft Corp. have AIDS-awareness programs in their workplaces. Microsoft and Texas Instruments Inc. include HIV/AIDS care as an employee benefit. Intel offers online AIDS education, holds HIV health fairs and passes out red ribbons to its Bangalore engineers. Ford Motor Co. has an HIV/AIDS-education program. It has rolled out similar efforts at its operations in South Africa, Thailand and China.

A handful of Indian companies are stepping up, too. Diversified giant Tata Group Ltd., auto-parts supplier Apollo Tyres Ltd., Reliance Industries Ltd. and direct marketer Modicare Ltd. offer a range of clinical, condom and prevention programs.

Game company ZMQ Software Systems, based in New Delhi, offers free downloads of cellphone games with a health message to some 22 million users. In the four games, players compete in an HIV quiz show, the virus chases a hero around the globe, cricketers swing their bats to whack AIDS, and a dove flies to Indian villages delivering condoms. "We're trying," says ZMQ's 37-year-old CEO Subhi Quraishi, "But we're a drop in the ocean."

Indeed, much of corporate India isn't as alarmed. Many don't see any impact from AIDS, in a society where stigma of the disease keeps many patients silent. The Confederation of Indian Industry, a nonprofit trade group, says 10% of its 5,000 member companies have committed to study AIDS as a first step; fewer still have workplace HIV education or prevention programs, according to the trade group's director and health chief Shefali Chaturvedi. "It is minuscule compared to the task at hand," she says. The trade group campaigns for more action through its newsletters and by sponsoring AIDS awareness programs.

At the Noida dance club, Mr. Nag says he's on his own when it comes to learning facts about AIDS. His employer, a call center operated by a British insurance company, doesn't have an education program, and the knowledge he does have was mostly gleaned from friends. His parents haven't offered much guidance, either. "I can do whatever I want," he says. "I just have to be careful."