Hand Washing Device Just at Rs. 35/-

The man who made a Hand Washing device and saved lives in just Rs.35!

Dr.Pawankumar Gulabrao Patil was one of the seven students selected for a two-year fellowship programme at Nirman’s SEARCH (Society for Education, Action and Research in Community Health), in Gadchiroli district, Maharashtra. The programme encourages students to work in areas affecting rural communities and being a physician, Dr. Pawan chose to work in the health sector.

When Dr. Pawan found out about the unhygienic living conditions in Gadchiroli, Maharasthra, he created a hand-washing device in just Rs.35 that has been saving the lives of the villagers.

Living in the community, he realised that there were several diseases persisting in the village, those that could be prevented by merely drinking clean water or paying more attention to cleanliness. He promptly did a study that revealed that of the 64 families living in the village, only six families used soap for washing hands.

The fact that diarrhea was the second largest contributor to infant mortality made him easily diagnose, prevent and treat many children dying from it. An act as simple as washing hands could save so many lives!
It was at this juncture, he heard about the Tippy Tap concept introduced in New Zealand. The idea simply involved a few sticks, a string and a soap to set up a low-cost hand-washing device.

For Dr. Pawan, the first challenge came in the design itself. When he first installed the device, goats would eat the soap and the kids were getting their pants soiled and so on. For six months, he solved the design issues one by one. And then, Nirmal, the robust Indian washing device, was born.
The next bigger challenge lay in getting the villagers to actually use this device. He smiles, “It is not that they did not have soaps, they had everything from Lux to Santoor. But for them, soaps were for beautification and not to remove dirt,” he says.

He took up his Nirmal device and with the help of school children, he set it up in the primary school of Kudakwahi village. This ensured that the kids had a sense of ownership towards the device. In a way, he says the kids co-developed the device with their suggestions to improve the design.

At a cost of 35 rupees, Pawan set up the community’s first hand washing device (with soap being the only recurrent cost). But this would not suffice. For sustained usage of the device, he knew that behavioral change was necessary.

In order to bring a permanent behavioural change, he initiated games such as Frisbee and engaged them with interactive songs that had conveyed a message against uncleanliness and negative effects of tobacco. He has now set up 83 Nirmal devices in 16 villages across Maharastra,