Patna: Bihar now boasts of three open-defecation free (ODF) districts. After Sitamarhi, which achieved the ODF status in July, Sheikhpura and Rohtas, too, have joined the list of such districts this month.

Till June this year, Bihar didn't have a single district in the list of 400 and odd districts from across the country which enjoyed the ODF status.

The sanitation scheme was launched on October 2, 2014, and since then, 68,620 toilets were constructed in Sheikhpura to achieve the ODF status, whereas the corresponding figures for Rohtas and Sitamarhi stand at 2,78,370 and 3,97,741 respectively.

"The toilet construction work has now gained momentum in the state and we hope to add Nalanda and Munger to the list of open-defecation free districts in two months," a senior rural development department official told The Telegraph on Thursday.

As on Thursday, Nalanda had achieved 95.96 per cent of its toilet construction target, whereas Munger had achieved 88.6 per cent of the corresponding work.

Sharing the department strategy for achieving the target of making Bihar open-defecation free by October 2019, the official said: "As the work has gained momentum, we aim to take the coverage level to minimum 70 per cent in all the districts in one month and then further accelerate the work."

There are five districts where the ODF coverage is above 70 per cent, whereas the remaining 30 districts fall in the bracket of 50 to 70 per cent coverage.

The official also revealed that though the target had been set for making the state ODF by October 2019, the department aimed to achieve this status latest by March 2019.

"Our aim is to complete maximum work by December this year and then use the January-to-March period to complete those works, which might have inadvertently been left out during out drive," said the official.

Construction of toilets has been a big challenge for Bihar since the launch of the scheme and there were just about 42 lakh households of a total of 1.65 crore households in Bihar with toilets.

In 2014-15, a total of 1.65 lakh toilets could be built and this figure jumped to 4.27 lakh in 2015-16.

The toilet construction work gained some pace after the rural development department was made the nodal department for this work in June 2016 and in 2016-17, a total of 8.73 lakh toilets were constructed.

The figure witnessed a major jump in 2017-18 during which 35.73 lakh toilets were constructed.

In the current fiscal, beginning from April 1, a total of 12,75,686 toilets had been constructed in the state till August 15.