MUMBAI: The number of Indian households using toilet cleaners has doubled as companies invested in building awareness about hygiene after the launch of the government’s ‘ Swachh Bharat ’ initiative about five years ago.Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi ’s ‘Swachh Bharat’ mission, the government has built more than 90 million toilets across the country. As a product segment, toilet cleaners were used at 22.5%, or nearly 65 million, households as of June quarter compared with 10.4%, or 29 million, households when the sanitation programme was launched, according to global consumer research firm Kantar Worldpanel.Bathroom sanitation products makers, including RB, Hindustan Unilever and Dabur, have since invested heavily in spreading awareness on better hygiene practices.RB, which sells market leader brand Harpic , also roped in actors Amitabh Bachchan and Akshay Kumar—who acted in the sanitation-promoting movie ‘Toilet: Ek Prem Katha’—as brand ambassador for its cleanliness drive.“Harpic, itself, is a massive innovation, including the nozzle which goes under the rim. India was also the first market to launch a Rs 5 pack of a sachet with a nozzle,” said Sukhleen Aneja, marketing director - Hygiene & Home, South Asia at RB. “For behaviour change habitbuilding communication, we brought Akshay Kumar as a change agent, who stood for a point of view on sanitation, helped us state the cause and gave us voice to massify the sanitation mission.”Five years ago, the government had pledged to make India open defecation-free by October 2019 through the construction of at least 120 million toilets across the country. In February this year, the government claimed to have constructed 92 million toilets.As a result, despite the slowdown in the consumer goods segment, the category has consistently increased its penetration, growing by 26-45% over the last four quarters. Five years ago, Hindustan Unilever launched Domex Toilet Academy programme and has so far trained 600 micro-entrepreneurs and masons to help build and maintain toilets and provide access to micro-financing and create demand for toilets in low-income households. It also launched a campaign ‘Why the Shame? Pick up the Brush’, relaunched the brand and extended a low-cost powder variant, designed for squat toilets, to select geographies in India.The National Annual Rural Sanitation Survey (NARSS) 2018-19, conducted by an independent verification agency (IVA) under the World Bank support project, has found that 96.5% of the households in rural India that have access to a toilet use it. The headroom to grow, especially in the rural market, is huge, say marketers. For instance, Kantar data revealed that 21 million households used toilet cleaners during the recent June quarter, a jump from 4.2 million five years ago in the hinterland. That's still an overall reach of just 11.4%.