Coronavirus may change Indians’ aversion towards hand washing

A study published in the Journal of Environmental Health has found that only 5 per cent of Americans wash their hands properly, meaning the person you’re greeting with a handshake is highly likely to have unclean hands. That five per cent Americans do not wash hands ‘properly’, nevertheless also means that 95 per cent of Americans do wash their hands. In India, people who do not wash their hands at all are in a democratic majority. An old article published in 2008 in the UNICEF website said that as per India’s Public Health Association, only 53 per cent of people in India wash hands after defecation, 38 per cent wash hands before eating and only 30 per cent wash hands before preparing food. Many people in India don’t wash their hands, because they believe that hands that look clean can not make them sick.

After reading the article, I came to know belatedly that October 15 is observed as Global Handwashing Day. The digital marketing machinery in India bombards you with promotional messages and memes for Mothers Day, Fathers Day, Valentine Day etc, but it hardly promotes Handwashing Day. The reason could be that our consumer companies may not see much incremental demand for their products by promoting the Global Handwashing Day. Now a novel virus has taken over that duty of promoting handwashing, ignored for long by our consumer companies and governments. COVID-19 prompted us, at least the urban Indians, to observe every day as a Global Handwashing Day and not just October 15 alone.

Global Handwashing Day was founded by an organisation called "Global Handwashing Partnership" to design, test and replicate creative ways to encourage people to wash their hands with soap at critical times. The first Global Handwashing Day was held in 2008; Indian cricket legend Sachin Tendulkar had joined hands to promote the first Global Handwashing Day in India.

The ‘Swachh Bharat Mission’ does not have the promotion of handwashing as one of its goals. The mission aims to improve the levels of cleanliness through Solid and Liquid Waste Management activities and making villages Open Defecation Free (ODF) and sanitised. It seems that “Mogambo Khush Nahi Hua” by the lofty goals of the Swachh Bharat Mission. One of the primary precautions required to be taken to dodge the dreaded Coronavirus is handwashing and avoid handshakes. We can not know whether the other person washed his hands properly or not by a visual inspection of his or her hands. So our Prime Minister Narendra Modi guided us to avoid a handshake altogether with other people. "The world due to Coronavirus outbreak is shifting towards greeting someone from handshakes to namaste. If by any means we have forgotten to use namaste, then it is the right time to do so," our Prime Minister said, giving a Hindu cultural spin to it.

However proud we may be of our culture, the Chinese dragon is always more advanced than us in finding novel viruses and in dodging them. A video posted to Twitter in China jokingly displays a new way people can greet each other without potentially spreading any germs: the “Wuhan Shake.” In the video, a group of people are seen tapping their shoe-covered feet against their friends’ shoe-covered feet instead of shaking hands.

The all-powerful POTUS Donald Trump says he would stick to the old way of shaking hands, because "you can't be a politician and not shake hands." However his deputy, US Vice-President Mike Pence, is now bumping elbows as an alternative greeting. Will Coronavirus permit bear hugs to continue between world leaders?

Under the benign reign of the virus, bear has tightly embraced the world markets and is in no mood to let out the embrace.

(V Venkateswara Rao is a retired corporate professional and a freelance writer.)