Women in Bihar have outvoted men voters in elections during the last five years, recording 7 per cent more voting. This data came from the Election Commission of India (ECI) findings.
Making a presentation at the international conference on 'Social Statistics in India' organised here by Asian Development Research Institute , Study of Developing Societies Director Sanjay Kumar said the ECI does not classify voters by any indicators other than gender.
The aggregate data provided by the ECI for 1957-2014 reveals that in lok Sabha elections the male-female gap in favour of men came down from 17 per cent to 2 per cent. The gender gap is bridging up in case of Assembly elections as well, which has come down from 5.2 per cent in 1990-92 to -1.2 per cent in 2014-15.
"For any other indicators of election patterns, we have to employ opinion data, survey data or ethnographic data. These could be collected only through field work, either by engaging researchers or field researchers," said Kumar.
The turnout of young voters (18-25 years) has seen a steep rise in the last five years, narrowing the voting percentage gap between them and general voters.
In the 2009 General Election, the turnout of general voters was 58 per cent and that of youth was 54 per cent. In 2014 election, the turnout shot up to 66 per cent, of which 68 per cent were youth or first-time voters.
Analysing another set of survey data figures, he said, "In the last lS election, 24 per cent Dalit voters cast their votes in favour of the BJP, which played a crucial role in its win."
At a technical session on 'New Frontiers of Social Statistics', Sourav Chakravorty, Associate Professor, Chennai Mathematical Institute, said that in the modern world the enormous growth in data size outpaced the computational power of computers so much as to be able to analyse just a fraction of the data.
He said rigorous mathematical analysis was required to meet the high dimensionality of the data.
Speaking on 'Econophysics of Socio-Economic Inequalities, JNU Professor Anirban Chakrabarty talked about how principles of dynamics can be applied to compare the stocks movement, adding that there is potential to analyse wealth and income distributions using theories of physics.
The session was chaired by Professor Anjan Mukherji, Country Director, IGC India-Bihar.