A database estimate for 2020 puts Shaktas at about three hundred and five million, the third largest of the groupings, with the usual and unusually severe caveats: there is no census of the traditions within Hinduism, the figure is modelled, and the Shakta and Shaiva categories overlap so heavily that treating them as separate populations is a convenience rather than a description.
Goddess worship is most concentrated in Bengal, Assam, Odisha, Bihar and the Tamil south, and in Nepal, where the living goddess tradition of the Kumari continues in Kathmandu. Durga Puja in Kolkata, an autumn festival of temporary sculpted pavilions that turns a whole city into an exhibition, was inscribed by UNESCO on its representative list of intangible cultural heritage in 2021. Navaratri is observed across India in strikingly different regional forms. The Shakti Peethas, the sites where parts of the Goddess's body are said to have fallen, form a pilgrimage network across the subcontinent, and Kamakhya in Assam is the most famous of them.
Shaktism's relationship with modern feminism is not simple, and is worth stating carefully. A tradition that places a female principle above the male gods has been read, by Indian and Western writers alike, as evidence of an indigenous feminism. Scholars of the tradition have generally resisted the reading, pointing out that goddess worship has coexisted with the social subordination of women for the whole of its history, and that the fierce goddesses are worshipped precisely because they are not what women are expected to be.