• Wash your hands thoroughly with lots of soap and plenty of clean water before cooking, preparing food, eating or even touching food.
• After going to the toilet, wash at least 2-3 times both the surfaces of both your hands thoroughly with lots of soap and plenty of water. After urination too, wash both surfaces of both your hands thoroughly with soap and water .
• Finger nails can introduce many infections into food. Keep your nails short. Keep them clean. Good lathering of soap helps to clean the nails. Wash your hands after going to the toilet
• Wash thoroughly with detergent (or ash) and clean water, the surface on which food will be placed and cooked (kitchen platform, ground- if the cooking is being done on the floor etc.). Also, clean thoroughly with soap and water or ash, all utensils, knifes strainers etc which are going to be used for cooking and preparing food .
• Try and keep your kitchen free of rats, cockroaches and flies. Also, before starting food preparation, clean the surface thoroughly with water and soap (or ash). Also, rinse the utensils again with water before initiating cooking

Background:
Many times people rinse their hands with water only.Through ' wash hands' many people would understand that one should rinse hands with water; they would not understand that soap is important and that without the use of soap the surface of the hand is unclean. Also, another problem is that (for certain reasons given below) the rinsing is done with unclean water ; soap may be inadequately lathered and only one surface of the hand is cleaned (instead of both the surfaces).

Soap & alternatives :
Soap or ash can be used. Most people cannot afford soap/detergent/washing powders and liquids; In situations when getting a daily meal and enough ingredients for cooking is an issue, spending on soap is unthinkable. Therefore, in many instances, even if they have soap, they do not lather it enough; this is done to conserve soap. This then becomes a habit and subsequently even when soap is available they do not lather the soap. Very commonly coal ash is used as a cheap economical substitute (also bio friendly) especially for washing utensils.

Water needs to be clean :
Many a times the water itself is not clean; usually the reason is that there is no flowing water. Typically one sees (like with food vendors on the road etc) that there is 1 bucket or small tub of water and everyone dips their hands into that, to take water with their hands. ( Water from the bucket with a mug or a glass with a long handle so that hands do not touch the water when taking the water out of the bucket.)

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