Aadhar Enrollment Numbers: Andhra Leads, Over 80% in 6 States

Since the time Aadhar UID program was launched, it has always been in news and has its own share of controversies. Some of them have gone to an extent to call it a sinister ploy and ultimate ID theft of Indians. Late in 2011, shelving of this mega-ambitious project was also being talked about.

However, UID project has been chugging along and with good Government funding, UID project looks to be on the path of success.

As per the recent Aadhar numbers, over 343 million Aadhar cards have been issued till May of 2013. This represents nearly 28.4 percent of Indian population. So as of now more than 1 in 4 Indian citizens have Aadhar cards in their hands.

State wise break-up of Aadhar Cards.

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Andhra Pradesh leads with over 59 million citizens now having Aadhar cards in their hands. This represents close to 70 percent of Andhra’s population.

Maharashtra has 2nd highest number of Aadhar cards issued with 55.3 million which represents nearly half the population in the state.

Over 25 million out of total 33 million karalaites have been issued Aadhar cards, which means 3 out of 4 people in Kerala have it.

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While the Southern and Western states of India are doing quite well as far as Aadhar registrations go, the Northern and North-eastern states seems to be completely ignoring the Aadhar project.

States of Meghalaya, Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Assam, Jammu & Kashmir etc have nearly zero percent registrations. Although these are smaller steps, Indian Government seriously needs to take steps to popularize Aadhar UID project there.

Among the states and Union Territories who have maximum percentages of Aadhar are Goa, Delhi, Puducherry, Sikkim, Tripura and Himachal Pradesh. All of these 6 states / UTs have over 80 percent concentration of Aadhar cards.

Conclusion

Although the growth of Aadhar UID has been relatively tepid till now, looking at the above numbers, it is becoming a reliable source of authentication, which includes fool-proof methods like bio-metrics.

To ensure that more and more people get Aadhar cards quickly, they really need to step up the efforts. Even today there are over 20 percent citizens who do not know where to apply for Aadhar cards. We did an extensive survey on this, and here are the findings