The spiralling whitefly Aleurodicus dispersus Russell (Hemiptera: Aleyrodidae), a highly polyphagous pest, has since about 2000 been an important pest of agricultural and horticultural crops in India. Despite its economic importance, little is known about the level and patterns of genetic variability in populations of the A. dispersus. In this study, we used the simple sequence repeats - polymerase chain reaction (SSR-PCR) technique was used to study the genetic diversity of A. dispersus in India. The present study is the first of its kind in India to utilize SSR markers for characterizing A. dispersus populations. A total of 356 different bands were scored using 18 primers for amplification. About 66.0% of alleles were polymorphic in A. dispersus populations. The SSR survey clearly detected moderate levels of polymorphism among the whitefly populations; multiple alleles were identified in many markers. The polymorphism information content (PIC) for SSR primers ranged from 0.0000 to 0.9541. Average genetic distances were estimated in our effort to investigate the level of DNA variation among the 7 geographic populations of A. dispersus from southern and northeastern India. The highest average genetic distance (0. 8182) was found between populations from Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh and Meghalaya and Mizoram. An UPGMA dendrogram based on similarity coefficients was constructed for the 7 populations analyzed. The A. dispersus population from Maharashtra was separated from those in the other 6 states viz., Tamil Nadu, Kerala, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Mizoram and Meghalaya.