For toothpaste they were already using other things. And shampoo does not have health benefits. Maybe it makes you smell a bit better, but rural Indians don't care too much about BO even now.
Setting aside the fact that condescending comments aren't mutually exclusive with true ones, I wonder if those packagings weren't "relatively useless" simply for the fact that small packagings ususally tend to be more expensive in the long run. It's more or less the same problem as with poor people in developed countries not being able to save money on batch buys, especially in case of supermarket discounts.
ex for toothpaste: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3545237/