Patna: Sitamarhi has become the first open defecation-free (ODF) district of Bihar, district magistrate Ranjit Kumar Singh told The Telegraph on Wednesday.

"Around two lakh toilets were completed in the past 72 days," the Sitamarhi district magistrate (DM) said while sharing details.

This achievement assumes significance as Bihar aims to become ODF by October 2 next year. For meeting the deadline the state needs to construct another 6,699,870 toilets. When the sanitation scheme was launched on October 2, 2014, there were just about 42 lakh households out of 16,736,449 and the number of households with toilets has now gone up to 10,036,579, say official figures.

As far as Sitamarhi district is concerned, it needed to construct 3,97,671 toilets at the time of launching of sanitation scheme and now all its 5,11,987 households boast of toilets. "The number of households will continue to increase and our aim is to ensure all the new houses in the district have toilets," the DM said.

Attributing the achievement to the people of Sitamarhi, Singh said a special drive was launched to achieve the target and motivators had been put into service in all the wards. Also, special monitoring teams had been constituted to keep a tab on those who used to go for open defecation.

The district administration also organised events like sanitation sports meet, cycle rally and special runs to generate awareness about the drive. One such run was organised on Tuesday after the district administration got to know that all households have toilets. The district has also performed well in terms of disbursing encouragement money of Rs 12,000 to households which got toilets built.

"We distributed Rs 115 crore among beneficiaries on a single day, June 27, and now on July 21 we are going to organise a similar camp for disbursing the encouragement money among 50,000 households which have still not received the money," said the DM.

Confirming the achievement of Sitamarhi district, rural development department secretary Arvind Choudhary said the achievement was commendable given that a large number of households were located in rural areas and need special efforts to convince people to go for toilet construction.

Choudhary said that now a state-level team would be sent to the district to cross-check the achievement and once this formality is completed a certificate would be issued declaring Sitamarhi an ODF district.

The department secretary heaped praise on the current DM and on his predecessor Rajiv Raushan for working tirelessly to make the district ODF.