๐ How Rare Are You in India?
๐ฎ๐ณ Genetic Landscape of India
India contains more genetic diversity than entire continents, with over 4,600 distinct population groups and 2,000+ ethnic groups. The ancient Dravidian south and Indo-Aryan north form two major genetic clusters, but tribal populations like the Andamanese carry some of humanity's oldest lineages (~65,000 years). Kashmir and the northwest show Central Asian and Persian influence with higher rates of light eyes and fair skin. Southern and eastern populations are more closely related to ancient Southeast Asian groups. B blood type is remarkably common (~32% total), one of the highest rates globally.
Marriage rules have done as much shaping here as geography. Many communities have married within a jati for generations while avoiding any partner who shares a gotra โ endogamy on one axis, strict exogamy on another โ so thousands of populations have stayed socially distinct while sharing the same streets. Names carry the same information. Much of the south uses no inherited surname at all: a Tamil name may be assembled from a village, a father's given name and a personal name, then compressed into initials on official forms, while northern families carry fixed surnames that frequently announce a community, a trade or a region. A feature that passes without comment in one community can be striking in the next one over.
๐๏ธ India Has Not Counted Itself Since 2011
The 1.44 billion at the top of this page is a projection, not a count. India’s last census was in 2011, and it put the total at 1.21 billion. There has been no national enumeration since, so every current national total for India — including the one the calculator on this page divides by — is an estimate.
A real count is running now. The government notified its intent in the Gazette of India on 16 June 2025, and Census 2027 — the sixteenth in the series, the eighth since independence — is being conducted under the Census Act, 1948 and the Census Rules, 1990. Phase I, house listing, runs from 1 April to 30 September 2026, with each state and union territory taking its own 30-day slot inside that window. Phase II, population enumeration, comes in February 2027 for most of the country, against a reference date of 00:00 on 1 March 2027; Ladakh and the snow-bound parts of Jammu and Kashmir, Himachal Pradesh and Uttarakhand are enumerated earlier, against a reference date of 00:00 on 1 October 2026. Phase II collects demographic, socio-economic, education, migration, fertility and caste information. Nothing in the announced subjects covers eye or hair colour, which is worth remembering two tables down.
๐๏ธ Eye Color
| Dark Brown | 60% |
| Brown | 30% |
| Hazel | 5% |
| Green | 2% |
| Blue/Gray | 1% |
| Other | 2% |
๐ Hair Color
| Black | 75% |
| Dark Brown | 20% |
| Brown | 4% |
| Other | 1% |
๐ฉธ Blood Type
| O+ | 36% |
| B+ | 28% |
| A+ | 22% |
| AB+ | 6% |
| O- | 4% |
| B- | 2% |
| A- | 1% |
| AB- | 1% |
Trait frequencies on this page come from public and institutional datasets โ see Data Sources.
🧮 Calculate Your Rarity in India
Pick your eye colour, hair colour and blood type. The calculator uses India's own figures from the tables above, not world averages.
This is an estimate, not a measurement. It multiplies three national frequencies as if they were independent, and they are not: eye and hair colour share pigmentation genes, so a combination that tends to run together, such as blue eyes with blonde hair, is more common than the multiplication suggests, while one that rarely does, such as blue eyes with black hair, is rarer. Blood type is independent of both. The frequencies are national averages from public datasets — see Data Sources.
That number describes the body you were born with. Fraeon, our other site, does the same arithmetic for the part you chose: the films, series, games, books, anime and manga you have actually finished. Start your log →
๐ฉธ Delhi and Bangalore Disagree About Blood
One national blood table cannot cover India, and three published donor series show why. A study of 16,925 donors at a regional blood transfusion centre in Delhi found B the most common group at 37.68%, with O at 29.27%. A study of 7,598 donors at a tertiary care hospital in Chengalpattu district, Tamil Nadu, found the reverse: O at 39.17%, B at 30.92%. A third, covering 36,964 donors in and around Bangalore, also put O first at 39.81%, with B at 29.95%.
So the answer to how rare your blood group is in India flips depending on which region’s donors were counted. The table above gives one national average; these three series are the sort of thing such an average has to average over. India’s e-RaktKosh, the Centralized Blood Bank Management System run by the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare, publishes stock by group and units collected — inventory, not population prevalence. And donor series are not population samples: donors are self-selected and screened, so each figure describes donors rather than the country.
๐ฌ The Phenotype Named After Bombay
The blood table above has eight rows, and there is a phenotype none of them can hold. It was written up in the Lancet on 3 May 1952 by Bhende, Deshpande, Bhatia, Sanger, Race, Morgan and Watkins, and it took the name of the city where it turned up: the Bombay phenotype.
What matters for a rarity page is what the paperwork does with it. On routine forward ABO typing it reads as group O; seeing it takes a separate test with anti-H lectin from Ulex europaeus, so it stays filed under O unless somebody goes looking. Where people have looked, the counts are small: 2 of 36,964 donors in the Bangalore series, and 6 of 56,465 donors and patients in a southern West Bengal one, which cites a general-population figure of roughly 1 in 10,000 in India against 1 in 100,000 in Europe. Our rarest blood type guide works from the same eight rows.
โญ Rare Facts About India
Where these numbers come from
The population figure is a projection, not a count. India’s last enumerated total was 1.21 billion, from Census 2011, run by the Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India; the next count is Census 2027. Neither the Census of India nor the National Family Health Survey — the survey that measures height in India, with IIPS Mumbai as its nodal agency — records eye or hair colour, so there is no official Indian source behind those two tables. For where the site’s trait frequencies come from, see Data Sources. Last checked: September 2026.