Only 35.8% Households In India Wash Hands With Soap Before A Meal

76th round of the National Sample Survey Organisation revealed that only 36% Indian households wash their hands with soap before a meal.

The National Sample Survey (NSS) 76th round report, 2019, reveals that 25.3 per cent households in rural India and 56 per cent in urban wash hands with soap or detergent before a meal; 2.7 per cent households in India wash hands with ash, mud, and sand before meals.

In rural areas, 70 per cent people wash hands with water without soap or detergent before a meal and in urban areas, 42 per cent of people follow this practice.

What is more alarming is that about 26 per cent people in India don’t wash their hands with soap or detergent after defecation. 13.4 per cent households (15.2 per cent rural and 9.8 per cent urban) wash hands only with water after defecation. Two-third toilets in India have water and soap/detergent available in or around the toilets.

“We need to address the entire sanitation value chain to prevent Covid-19.

This figure was arrived at on the basis of the survey that included a household in this category if majority of the household members usually washed their hands with soap. This means not everyone may not be washing their hands with soap in these homes. More than 60 per cent used only water to wash hands.

Findings of the survey assume significance for India, especially in the context of novel coronavirus outbreak.

According to experts, dirt on our hands can be removed from simple water. But this is not a proper way of maintaining hand hygiene. Despite washing our hands with water, microscopic grimes remain attached. These are the shelters for novel coronavirus and many other pathogens.

For most Indians, this way of sanitization is not a practice. For an outsider or essentially urbane population knowing Indians through books and journals which have documented Mahatma Gandhi’s untiring efforts and emphasis on cleanliness, this would come as a shock.

This is also surprising that successive governments in the past two decades have failed to take this message of cleanliness to the last person in the village. India launched Total Sanitation Campaign (TSC) in 1999, which became Nirmal Bharat Abhiayan (NBA) in 2012 and the Swachh Bharat Mission in 2014.

But years later, an NSSO survey finds that only 25 per cent wash their hands before a meal in rural areas and 56 per cent in urban areas.

The figures are better for practice of washing hands after defecation. Over 74 per cent wash their hands after defecation — close to 67 per cent in rural areas and over 88 per cent in urban areas. However, the problem here with novel coronavirus is that even this minority of non-soap using population 26 per cent of all in case of defecation — can become the hotspot of Covid-19 once the virus travels to these groups.