According to the WHO, poor handwashing was responsible for more than 297,000 deaths low-income countries in 2013. In low income countries, many reasons are responsible for poor hand washing and hand hygiene. Some of these are availability of basic infrastructures such as washbasins, soaps, and water, to low awareness on handwashing practices or simple unwillingness of to wash hands after critical times.
Socio-economic factors such as caste, income, and education play a key role in shaping poor handwashing habits. In fact, the culture of handwashing is an interplay between these factors.
Statistics on handwashing in India also align with this theory. While almost all households in India (as high as 97% according to recent surveys) have washbasins, only richer and more educated households in urban areas use soap to wash hands.
The gap between rich and poor households is huge – only 2 out of 10 poor households use soap compared to 9 out of ten rich households.
Caste and class play an equal role in deepening disparities, with Scheduled Castes and Tribes reporting the lowest use of soaps for handwashing in India.
If you add up all the situations in which international authorities such as UNICEF recommend washing hands during this pandemic—after visiting a public space or touching a surface outside the home, after coughing, sneezing, or blowing your nose, and of course after using the toilet or taking out garbage and before and after eating—it easily amounts to at least 10 times a day.
For this country especially, that’s quite a lot of handwashing.
This lack of hand hygiene makes rural communities vulnerable to various communicable diseases. In India, almost 21 percent of communicable diseases, including cholera, dysentery, hepatitis A, and typhoid, are water-borne, and could be prevented in part with better handwashing—as could respiratory diseases such as flu and COVID-19.