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

Residents across Delhi are raising alarms about a persistent and damaging problem in the city's digitised public records systems: photographs belonging to one person appearing on the identity files of another. The issue, which officials at several ward offices have acknowledged receiving complaints about, surfaces most visibly in ration cards, Delhi Development Authority housing allotment files, and voter identity rolls maintained under the Election Commission of India's electoral roll programme.

The timing matters. Delhi is in the middle of a major voter roll revision ahead of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi ward boundary re-delimitation exercise, and the Delhi government's e-district portal — the primary digital window for citizens to access civil records — processed more than 1.2 crore document requests in the financial year 2024-25, according to figures published by the Delhi government's IT department. When photographs are duplicated or wrongly assigned in that volume of records, the downstream consequences for individual citizens can run for months.

Chandni Chowk to Dwarka: Where the Problem Shows Up

The complaints cluster in specific places. In Chandni Chowk's Katra Neel locality, where multi-generational families share addresses and sometimes similar names, residents have described approaching the Sadar Bazar ward office more than once to correct ration card photographs that were replaced during a bulk digitisation drive carried out in 2023. Similar reports have come from Dwarka Sector 10, where Delhi Development Authority flat allottees say their housing files — relevant when they apply for resale permissions or mutation entries — carry photographs that do not match their current identity documents.

The DDA's online housing portal, relaunched with expanded features in late 2024, requires photograph matching as part of its verification layer. When the photograph on an old allotment file differs from a current Aadhaar-linked image, the system flags the record for manual review — a process residents say can take anywhere from six weeks to four months at the DDA district offices on Vikas Sadan in INA Colony.

Beyond housing, the problem has shown up in applications routed through the Delhi government's Jan Seva Kendra centres. A Jan Seva Kendra coordinator at the Karol Bagh centre confirmed in a public ward meeting in May 2026 — as reported by the ward committee — that photograph mismatch complaints formed a significant share of the centre's document correction queue that month, though no specific figure was cited in the public record of that meeting.

What Residents Are Asking For

Community members in the affected areas are not simply frustrated. They have organised. Resident Welfare Associations in Rohini Sector 7 and Lajpat Nagar Part II have separately submitted memoranda to their local MLA offices asking for a dedicated photograph correction window at ward-level offices, with a guaranteed 15-day resolution timeline rather than the current ad hoc process.

The Lajpat Nagar RWA's memorandum, dated June 12, 2026 and available on the association's public notice board, lists 34 households as having been affected by photograph mismatches in government documents over the preceding twelve months. The document calls on the Delhi government's Revenue Department to conduct a fresh audit of all records digitised between January 2022 and December 2023, the period when several bulk scanning contracts were executed.

A fee of ₹50 is currently listed on the e-district portal for a photograph correction application for most civil documents. Residents say the fee is not the obstacle — the follow-through is. Applications submitted online are frequently redirected to physical verification at the Sub-Divisional Magistrate office nearest to the applicant's address, adding travel time and lost working days.

The Revenue Department has not published a formal response to the RWA memoranda. Citizens who have filed corrections through the e-district portal are advised to retain their acknowledgement number, follow up at their nearest Jan Seva Kendra after 21 working days, and carry both old and current identity documents to any in-person hearing. If a record remains uncorrected after two formal applications, the Lokayukta of Delhi accepts written grievances and has jurisdiction over Revenue Department compliance matters.