This paper presents a feasibility study to compare the performance of fingerprint recognition on rural and urban Indian population. The analysis shows that rural population is very challenging and existing algorithms/systems are unable to provide acceptable performance. On the other hand, fingerprint recognition algorithms provide comparatively better performance on urban population. The study also shows that poor images quality, worn and damaged patterns and some special characteristics affect the performance of fingerprint recognition.© Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.