Old Photos, Wrong Faces: Delhi Residents Speak Out on the Chaos of Duplicate Image Replacement in Government Records

Residents across Delhi are describing the same nightmare: they open their Aadhaar-linked portal, voter ID card, or Delhi government ration record and find a stranger's face staring back at them. The photograph has been replaced — not by their own updated image, but by a duplicate entry pulled from another citizen's file. For some, this means delayed subsidy payments. For others, it has meant being turned away at a Delhi Metro Phase 4 smart-card enrollment counter.

The problem is not new, but complaints have surged since January 2026, when the Delhi government accelerated a digitisation push under its e-District Services framework, a program run through district-level Common Service Centres. Officials linked multiple legacy databases — including older Municipal Corporation of Delhi voter rolls and Public Distribution System records — into a unified portal. The merging process, according to complaints filed at Lok Sewa Kendras across the city, triggered a wave of image mismatches that has been difficult to unwind.

Lives Disrupted in Chandni Chowk and Dwarka

In the lanes off Khari Baoli Road in Old Delhi, a community of small traders says the records mess has hit them hardest. Shopkeepers who rely on their GSTIN registration photos — cross-referenced against Aadhaar biometrics — have been flagged as mismatches by automated systems. Some say their bank accounts linked to Jan Dhan Yojana have been temporarily frozen pending re-verification. The Chandni Chowk area has one of the highest concentrations of small-business Aadhaar-linked accounts in North Delhi, according to district office tallies maintained by the North Delhi Municipal zone.

Across the city in Dwarka Sector 12, residents of a cooperative housing society report a different variant of the problem. Their photographs, submitted during a Delhi Jal Board e-KYC drive in March 2026, were duplicated across multiple accounts when a batch-processing error assigned the same image file to sequential account numbers. At least 47 households in that sector lodged written complaints at the Dwarka Sub-Divisional Magistrate's office between April and June, according to records reviewed by this reporter. Several said their water bill accounts now show a neighbour's face, making biometric payment verification impossible at Jal Board kiosks.

The experience has left many residents feeling invisible in a system designed to make them more legible to the state. At a Lok Sewa Kendra in Rohini Sector 3, a queue of around 30 people waited on a recent weekday morning, most clutching printouts of their mismatched profiles. Correction requests require a self-attested photograph, an original ID document, and an appointment — a process that, residents say, can take three to six weeks under current load.

What the Records Show — and What Comes Next

The Right to Service Act, which Delhi adopted in its current form in 2011 and which mandates resolution timelines for government grievances, specifies a 30-day window for document correction requests filed through the e-District portal. Advocates at the Delhi Legal Services Authority's main office on Patiala House Courts Road say the volume of image-mismatch complaints received in the April-June 2026 quarter is roughly double the comparable period in 2025, though the authority has not yet published the full quarterly data.

The Delhi government's Information Technology department has acknowledged the batch-processing issue in internal communications, according to a notice posted on the e-District Services portal on June 18, 2026, which directed affected residents to re-submit photographs through the Common Service Centre network rather than attempting corrections through private e-Mitra operators. That notice has since been removed from the public-facing page, though archived copies circulate in resident welfare association WhatsApp groups in localities from Laxmi Nagar to Najafgarh.

Citizens dealing with mismatched images should visit their nearest Lok Sewa Kendra with original documents, file a written complaint under Grievance ID Category 14-B on the e-District portal, and request a timestamped acknowledgment receipt — which legally triggers the 30-day resolution clock under Delhi's Right to Service rules. Residents in North Delhi can also approach the North DMC's helpline at its Civil Lines headquarters. The IT department has not confirmed when a system-wide audit of the January digitisation merge will be completed.