Delhi's Duplicate Image Problem: How the Capital Stacks Up Against London, Singapore and São Paulo

Delhi's municipal records contain tens of thousands of duplicate photographs — the same cracked pavement, the same clogged drain photographed multiple times by different contractors and filed as separate repair requests — a problem that the Delhi Municipal Corporation has acknowledged is distorting budget allocation and slowing genuine infrastructure responses across the capital. The issue came into sharper focus this year after the DMC began digitising legacy complaint records going back to 2019 as part of its Smart City data consolidation drive.

The stakes are practical. When the same pothole on Netaji Subhash Marg or the same flooded underpass near Minto Road appears in the civic grievance system under four different reference numbers, repair crews may be dispatched multiple times or, just as badly, the complaint may be deprioritised because the system flags it as already addressed. Either outcome wastes money and erodes public trust in the 311-style complaint portal that the DMC rolled out city-wide.

How Other Cities Are Solving It

London's Transport for London authority tackled a comparable duplicate-image problem in its street-inspection database in 2023, deploying perceptual hashing — a technique that generates a compact digital fingerprint for each photograph — to identify near-identical images filed by different inspectors. TfL's published annual report for that year described a reduction in duplicate work orders, though the authority did not release a specific percentage figure publicly. Singapore's Urban Redevelopment Authority has gone further, integrating image-deduplication directly into its OneService citizen-feedback app since early 2024, so that a photograph taken of the same defect within a 50-metre radius and a 72-hour window is automatically merged rather than logged separately. São Paulo's Prefeitura de São Paulo applied a similar filter to its Fala SP complaint platform, which handles more than 1.5 million submissions annually according to the city's own published data.

Delhi's situation differs in scale and in the fragmented nature of its governance. Civic responsibility in the capital is split between the DMC, the New Delhi Municipal Council — which covers the Lutyens' zone and areas around Connaught Place — and the Delhi Development Authority. Each body runs its own grievance portal and its own photographic archive. None of the three currently shares a common deduplication layer, according to publicly available documentation of their respective IT frameworks. That means a single broken footpath on Chandni Chowk's Nai Sarak could legitimately exist in all three systems simultaneously.

What Delhi Is — and Isn't — Doing

The DMC's Smart City Cell, based in the Civil Lines zone, has been piloting an image-matching tool since January 2026 as part of the broader Phase 2 of the Unified Grievance Management System. The pilot covers six of Delhi's 12 zones. The NDMC, separately, issued a tender in March 2026 for a digital-asset-management system that includes deduplication functionality, with a stated budget of ₹2.8 crore — though that figure comes from the tender notice and has not been independently verified against final contract awards. The DDA has not publicly announced a comparable initiative.

Urban informatics researchers who study South Asian cities point to Bengaluru's BBMP as a closer peer than London or Singapore. The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike integrated basic duplicate-detection into its Sahaaya portal in 2022, a move that reportedly cut redundant work orders in the solid-waste category. Chennai's Greater Municipal Corporation began a similar exercise for its road-maintenance photo logs in late 2024. Both cases suggest that Indian metros can implement this at reasonable cost — but only when governance is centralised enough to force data-sharing across departments.

For Delhi, the path forward likely depends on whether the three civic bodies can agree on a shared technical standard before the monsoon season deepens the annual deluge of drainage complaints. The DMC's pilot is due to produce an internal assessment report by September 2026. If that report is made public and shows measurable gains in the six pilot zones — covering areas including Shahdara and South Delhi — it could provide the political momentum needed to bring the NDMC and DDA into alignment. Without that, residents filing complaints through the MyDMC app or the NDMC's own portal should expect the same photograph of the same broken road to keep circulating through the system, unchecked, for another budget cycle.