How Delhi's Public Records Became a Graveyard of Duplicate Images — And Why It Matters Now

Delhi's public administration is sitting on a quiet data crisis. Across at least a dozen municipal and state agencies — from the Delhi Development Authority to the offices of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi — officials are now reckoning with the scale of duplicate image contamination inside digitised record systems, a problem that accumulated over more than a decade of fragmented scanning drives and was largely ignored until it began generating visible errors in citizen-facing services.

The reckoning matters now because it is no longer just a bureaucratic inconvenience. With the Aam Aadmi Party government having committed to expanding e-governance under its Delhi Digital Mission, and with the Election Commission of India's continuous voter roll updation pushing more photograph-linked records into circulation, the integrity of image data has direct consequences for residents trying to obtain ration cards, property mutation certificates, and driving licences. Duplicate photographs — the same image filed under two or more different names or addresses — create ambiguities that can delay approvals for months.

How the Problem Built Up

The roots go back to the early 2010s, when multiple agencies launched independent scanning initiatives without a shared technical standard. The MCD's birth and death registration unit, the Revenue Department's land record digitisation project at Patwari offices across areas like Mehrauli and Rohini, and the Delhi Jal Board's consumer database were each computerised by different vendors using different image compression formats and metadata schemas. No single node — not the National Informatics Centre's Delhi unit at Lok Nayak Bhawan, nor the state's IT Department — held authority to enforce a unified protocol.

By the mid-2010s, photographs were being bulk-uploaded with generic filenames. A scanning operator working through a backlog of thousands of files at, say, the Sub-Divisional Magistrate's office in Dwarka or at a Seva Kendra in Shahdara would assign a sequential number rather than a unique citizen identifier. The result: image files that exist in multiple entries across the same database, sometimes attached to entirely different names because of manual re-entry errors at different counters.

The 2020 shift to remote services during the Covid-19 period accelerated the problem. Residents submitted photographs electronically through the Delhi e-District portal, and verification — which should have cross-checked new uploads against existing records — was not uniformly enforced. According to a 2023 audit of the e-District platform published by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India, a sample check of district-level service applications found data inconsistencies in a material share of records reviewed, though the specific figure for image duplication alone was not separately reported in the document available to this reporter.

What Agencies Are Doing — and What Still Isn't Working

The Delhi government's IT Department floated a de-duplication pilot in late 2024, targeting the Aadhaar-linked photograph fields inside the Public Distribution System database maintained under the Food and Civil Supplies Department. The pilot covered records across three revenue districts. The technology used — perceptual hashing, which generates a numeric fingerprint for each image and flags near-identical matches — is not new; the National Crime Records Bureau has used similar tools for fingerprint matching since at least 2018. What is new is its application to civilian administrative records at the state level in Delhi.

Progress has been slow. The pilot's findings were not publicly released as of June 2026, and no timeline for a city-wide rollout has been formally announced. The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, which maintains its own photograph-linked smart card database of roughly 30 lakh registered commuters, runs a separate system that has not been integrated into the state-level de-duplication effort at all.

For residents, the practical advice right now is direct: if you have applied for any document-linked service through a Seva Kendra — there are more than 100 across Delhi's 11 revenue districts — and received a rejection citing a photograph mismatch or duplicate record, file a rectification request at the same centre in person, bringing your original Aadhaar card and a self-attested photograph. Officers at Seva Kendras have a 15-day statutory window under the Delhi Right of Citizens to Time Bound Delivery of Services Act, 2011, to resolve such disputes. That window exists. The question is whether the underlying data problem gets fixed before another generation of records inherits it.