A Study of Correlation and Spatio-Temporal Variation in Literacy Rate and Sex Ratio in Bihar

Literacy rate and sex ratio have always been considered to be an important key for socio-economic growth of the study area. In a state like Bihar, where the literacy rate is at its lowest level, people are required to be educated because literate people will have a better understanding of their surroundings, which helps in social and economic improvement. On other side it will ultimately affect the population composition like sex ratio. As compared to nation as a whole, Bihar is having low sex ratio and low literacy rate which reveals its socio-economic backwardness. Among all the natural resources human resources is an important part, which includes, population growth, labor force, skills, working capacity etc. , which can be improved by means of increasing the level of literacy. Literacy erase gender biasness, but low literacy does not necessarily imply gender biasness. In fact some of the districts of Bihar with low literacy have healthy sex ratio. Literacy rate and sex ratio are important aspects of demographic studies and indicate the status of the study area. Present paper deals with the spatio-temporal variation in literacy rate and sex ratio as well as their comparative analysis and also tries to understand the impact of literacy rate on the sex ratio by means of Karl Pearson’s method of correlation, taking literacy rate as an independent variable. It has been found that there is no correlation between literacy rate and sex ratio in the census year 2001, but in the census year 2011, the value of coefficient of correlation is +0.1454, which indicates that there is a low level of positive correlation between literacy rate and sex ratio. It is also reflected by means of the fact that districts like Gopalganj, Siwan and Saran with very high literacy rate also recorded very high sex ratio. Gopalganj with the highest sex ratio of 1021 females per thousand male recorded very high literacy rate of 65.47 percent which is 3.67 percentage point higher than the literac