NEW DELHI: More than a quarter of the SIM cards in the country have been linked to Aadhaar , according to the latest numbers accessed by ET, as the government pushes ahead with plans to link all mobile numbers with the unique identification number by next February.Linking a SIM to Aadhaar requires a trip to the mobile operator’s service centre, unlike the process for PAN or bank account number, which can be done online.“Online linking of mobile number has a security risk,” a senior government official explained to ET. “If a fraudster knows your Aadhaar number, name and other details, then he can link a mobile number to your Aadhaar…and if he commits a crime, police will reach your home.”As per data from the Unique Identification Authority of India provided to ET, there was an estimated 128 crore mobile phone connections in the country as of July and 33.8 crore SIM cards have either been issued or linked by telecom operators using Aadhaar e-KYC – meaning a customer’s fingerprint was taken to authenticate identity. This translates to 25% of mobile phone customers in India complying so far.The rest of the country’s mobile subscribers will have to line up at the service centres of telecom operators with their Aadhaar details and provide their fingerprints there or risk deactivation of their connections after February.As of July, 7.55 crore of the 35.01 crore subscribers of Bharti Airtel , the country’s biggest telecom operator, had got their Aadhaar linked to their SIMs, data from UIDAI showed. The numbers for Idea Cellular stand at 7.99 crore out of 26.08 crore connections and for Vodafone India, they were 4.5 crore of 25.9 crore subscribers. Reliance Jio Infocomm , which started services a year ago and issued new connections through Aadhaar e-KYC, has 10.78 crore of 12.32 crore connections linked. For Aircel, the figure was 1.16 crore of 9.43 crore users.The government is citing a Supreme Court order to get all mobile SIMs linked to Aadhaar. The apex court passed an order in February in a case filed by Lokniti Foundation, saying details and addresses of all mobile phone subscribers must be re-verified within a year using the mechanism devised by the Centre to issue new SIM cards through Aadhaar e-KYC. The Department of Telecommunications approved Aadhaar e-KYC for new SIM cards in August 2016 to help customers get them activated within a few minutes instead of one or two days through normal documents. The Unique Identification Authority of India said sharing one’s fingerprint with the telecom operator will not compromise an individual’s privacy.“The telecom company cannot store your biometrics. The biometrics collected should be encrypted by the telecom company at that moment itself. Any storage of biometrics by a service provider is a criminal offence punishable under the Aadhaar Act,” a government official said.