Consider the following statements :
1) The proportion of the young population (0-19 years) in Bihar is projected to decline significantly by 2041.
2) Bihar's demographic dividend is expected to peak a

Question

Consider the following statements :
1) The proportion of the young population (0-19 years) in Bihar is projected to decline significantly by 2041.
2) Bihar's demographic dividend is expected to peak around 2041.
3) The elderly population (60 + years) in Bihar is expected to rise more sharply than in India.
Select the correct answer using the codes given below :

UnlockIAS · Accepted Answer

Correct — A, "1 and 2 are correct". All three statements come from Chapter 12 of the Bihar Economic Survey 2024-25, and two of them survive. Statement 1 is true, and the decline is not marginal: the Survey projects the 0-19 age band to fall from 49.4 per cent of Bihar's population in 2011 to 30.1 per cent in 2041, a loss of 19.3 percentage points, with Appendix Table A 12.4 on printed page 478 giving the decade steps as 43.50 per cent in 2021, 35.05 per cent in 2031 and 30.12 per cent in 2041. Statement 2 is true in the Survey's own words — Bihar's demographic dividend will peak around 2041, when the share of the working-age, that is 20 to 59 years, population is expected to hit 58.3 per cent from 43.2 per cent in 2011; the same appendix table tracks it at 48.86, 55.84 and 58.28 per cent across the three decades. Statement 3 is false, and this is the point at which a great deal of published commentary on this paper has the comparison the wrong way round. Bihar's 60-plus share is projected to rise from 7.4 per cent in 2011 to 11.6 per cent in 2041 — an increase of 4.2 percentage points. India's elderly share rises by 7.3 percentage points over the same window, which is 3.1 percentage points MORE than Bihar's, not less. The Commission made the same point in levels when it published its final revised key on 31 October 2025, citing page 478 and Table A 12.4 directly: Bihar's elderly population is expected to be 11.6 per cent in 2041 while India's will be about 16 per cent. Statement 3 therefore fails on either reading of "more sharply" — Bihar's increase is the smaller one and Bihar's 2041 level is the lower one. With statement 3 out, options (b) and (c) both fall, because each of them contains it, and only option (a) is left standing. One provenance point that must travel with these numbers: they are the Bihar Economic Survey's OWN projections, computed by the State because no official district-level projection existed, using annual population growth rates taken from the Economic Survey of India 2018-19. They are not Census figures, and they are not the National Commission on Population and Registrar General's Population Projections for India and States 2011-2036, which stop at 2036 and cannot produce a 2041 number at all.

Why the other options are wrong — (b) The most attractive wrong answer on the item, because it pairs a genuinely true statement with the one the intuition wants to accept. Statement 1 is correct — the 0-19 share does fall from 49.4 per cent to 30.1 per cent. Statement 3 is not: Bihar's 60-plus share rises 4.2 percentage points, from 7.4 to 11.6 per cent, while India's rises 7.3 percentage points to roughly 16 per cent by 2041. A code is only correct if every statement inside it is correct, so one false member is fatal to the whole option.  (c) Fails for the same single reason. Statement 2 is true — the Survey says in terms that Bihar's demographic dividend will peak around 2041, with the 20-59 band reaching 58.3 per cent against 43.2 per cent in 2011. But statement 3 is false, and carrying it into the code destroys the code. Notice that statement 3 appears in both (b) and (c): a candidate who tests that one statement first and finds it false has eliminated two of the three substantive options in a single step, without needing to verify statement 2 at all.  (d) Cannot be right on this item, and it is worth seeing why. The codes (a), (b) and (c) name mutually exclusive pairs, so more than one of them could be simultaneously correct only if all three underlying statements were true — the situation on Q53 of this same paper, where every statement held and the compound option was the answer. Here exactly two statements are true, which means precisely one code matches the facts. The option is a decoy for candidates who reach for it whenever they are unsure rather than because the arithmetic of the codes supports it.

Concept: Demographic transition theory describes the path every population takes as it modernises: death rates fall first, birth rates fall a generation later, and in the interval between the two the population grows quickly and then, crucially, changes shape. The gap produces a bulge that moves up the age pyramid — first as a very large cohort of children, then as a very large cohort of working-age adults, and finally as a very large cohort of the elderly. The middle phase is the demographic dividend: a window in which the share of people of working age is at its historical maximum and the dependency ratio, the number of dependants each hundred workers support, is at its minimum. The dividend is an opportunity, not a payment. It is realised only if the large working-age cohort is educated, healthy and actually employed, which is why policy attention attaches to skilling and job creation rather than to the demography itself. India as a whole entered this window in the 2000s and its national dividend is generally placed as peaking in the 2030s. Bihar is a decade or more behind, because its fertility decline started later — its total fertility rate was 3.00 in the National Family Health Survey 2019-21, the highest of any State against an all-India figure of 2.0. Late fertility decline has two consequences that this question turns on: Bihar's working-age share keeps climbing until about 2041, later than the national peak, and Bihar's population ages more slowly than India's, because it keeps replenishing its young cohorts while the national pyramid is already narrowing at the base.

State PCS 2025 Q54 — Economy PYQ with Answer

State PCS 2025 Q54 — Economy PYQ with Answer