Bihar tops out of eight EAG States in respect of Dependency Ratio

The following table has compared the dependency ratios for both the rural and urban residences for all the EAG States:

S. No.	State	Dependency Ratio Total	Dependency Ratio Rural	Dependency Ratio Urban
1	Rajasthan	75.2	80.1	61.5
2	Odisha	62.1	64.6	50.4
3	Bihar	92.0	95.5	71.6
4	Jharkhand	75.8	82.7	58.8
5	Madhya Pradesh	68.9	75.5	56.8
6	Chhattisgarh	64.6	68.1	53.1
7	Uttar Pradesh	82.1	88.2	63.4
8	Uttarakhand	69.8	75.5	57.1

The data is taken from Annual Health survey, 2010.  The dependency ratio is normally calculated by having (in percentage) numerator as number of persons below 15 year plus persons above 60 years and denominator as the total population of ages 15-60 years. The top four states in the dependency ratio are Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and Rajasthan.  It may be true as there is lot of migration of working population to other states from these states.  In case of Urban residence, the top three are Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.  Odisha has the least of all for all the types of residencies.

A high dependency ratio can cause serious problems for the respective governments, as the largest proportion of a government's expenditure is on health, social security & education which are most used by old and young population. Also the increasing expenditure on pension becomes a problem too.