LUCKNOW: With over one crore people and counting registering for a free smartphone in UP, the ultimate budget of this ambitious scheme may surpass even that of the Lucknow Metro if Akhilesh Yadav and Samajwadi Party manage to repeat a five-year-term.On December 6 evening, the total number of registrations for a free smartphone from a prospective SP government after the 2017 polls , crossed the 1 crore mark - 10005181 to be precise. 96% of these applicants are in the young age group of 18-34 though applications are open for all age groups. Infact , 86% of all applicants are between 18-24 years of age. 38% of all applicants are females, as per the data with ET. "We are expecting at least 30 lakh-50 lakh more registrations till the extended date of December 31," UP Principal Secretary, Information Technology Sanjiv Saran told ET , adding it will be the world's biggest free smartphone home-delivery exercise of an expected 1.5 Cr phones when it happens. Considering a smartphone may cost at least Rs 5000, the budget for this could be to the tune of Rs 7000-8000 Cr. The Lucknow Metro cost the UP government almost Rs 7000 Cr while the Agra-Lucknow expressway has cost UP over Rs 13000 Cr.The Akhilesh Yadav government is attaching top priority to this promise - much like the free laptops promise before the 2012 polls which the SP won and later distributed nearly 18 lakh free laptops to meritorious students. In the smartphone exercise, Mulayam Singh Yadav's constituency of Azamgarh has emerged among the top three districts reporting the most registrations at 3.75 lakh. The top two districts are Allahabad and Jaunpur while Lucknow has seen 2.98 lakh registrations and PM's constituency Varanasi has seen 2.6 lakh registrations. Surprisingly, NCR districts like Gautam Budh Nagar (NOIDA) and Ghaziabad are way behind with just 31175 and 70827 registrations respectively so far.The Samajwadi government is enthused with the high level of registrations by youth so far -- with senior officials saying it shows the youth of the state are firmly behind Akhilesh Yadav and believing he can win again. The scheme approved by Cabinet is essentially tied to the prospect of Yadav repeating a term and buying and home-delivering the smartphones July onwards. Saran says the scheme is different from the laptop scheme for meritorious students of Class 10 and 12 as this one is open for all age groups with some conditions - of being above 18 years, Class 10 pass, having annual family income below Rs 6 lakh and the family not having a Class 1 or 2 government employee. The scheme's last date has been extended twice - from November 10 to November 25 to now December 31 to attract the maximum registrations.