Washing their hands of it

Culturally conscious Kerala needs to be commended for keeping the World Bank’s ambitious ‘hand washing initiative’ at arm&#14...

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Culturally conscious Kerala needs to be commended for keeping the World Bank’s ambitious ‘hand washing initiative’ at arm’s length.

By forcing the project’s promoters to do a rethink on launching it in Kerala, India’s most literate state has taught the high-profile experts of the World Bank, the Water & Sanitation Program (WSP) and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), a lesson on the futility of ‘educating’ the Malayali on the art of hand washing with soap.

Thanks to the outcry, the Rs 48 crore initiative has now been suspended. The leader of the Opposition in the Kerala assembly, V.S. Achuthanandan, quite rightly wondered at the choice of Kerala — whose overall health index is better than many Western countries — for such a project. The growing opposition forced the state irrigation minister, T.M. Jacob, to do a rethink. His ministry is the nodal agency for the project. It is now clear that in the guise of reducing the incidence of diarrhoeal diseases, the project was designed to promote the interests of the international soap industry. Big players like Procter&Gamble, Unilever and Johnson&Johnson are a part of it.

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The project is no less flawed on technical grounds, as well. According to Valerie Curtis, senior lecturer at the LSHTM and a key architect of the project, ‘Our representative study of 872 people across Kerala found soap in every household.

However, a follow-up study with the very poor found only two households who were temporarily out of soap.’ So the project chose to educate people on using available soap to its best advantage for their health.

Curtis responded to questions through an electronic interview. However, when questioned on the validity of a small sample size of less than a thousand to design a project intending to cover a population of 32 million, she refrained from offering comment. Curtis accepted that Kerala has a rich culture of hygiene and most people boil their drinking water. She felt that the project was building on the existing habits and culture in Kerala.

But there is a dodge here. By choosing a state that has the lowest incidence of childhood diarrhoea could it not mean that the project was seeking legitmacy to sell soap rather than save lives? Curtis, responding to the charge made by the Kerala Small Scale Soap Manufacturers Association that the project aims to derail the challenge posed to global brands by local ayurvedic soaps which are beginning to create their own niche, contends that the hand washing initiative has been built around changing habits and is not about promoting brand loyalty.

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This bubbling controversy has left government officials and project promoters high and dry. World Bank’s modus operandi of co-opting government officials for pushing its programmes is well known. Foreign travel and post-retirement consultancies are the carrots offered in order to gain the government’s patronage. And when an IAS officer happens to be one of key resource persons in the project, the task becomes even easier.

Kerala’s refusal to accept one of the Bank’s more ambitious projects comes as an embarrassment to it. However, given the internal dynamics of the donor sector, the project may easily get relocated elsewhere in the country.

The writer is attached to the Delhi-based The Ecological Foundation