Delhi Government's Mass Image Audit Exposes Thousands of Duplicate Photos Clogging Official Records This Week

Delhi's Department of Administrative Reforms flagged more than 14,000 duplicate images embedded across official e-records this week, throwing a spotlight on the messy state of the capital's much-trumpeted digital transformation. The discovery, surfaced during a routine audit of the Delhi Integrated Multi-Modal Transit System's document repository and cross-checked against records held by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, has prompted an emergency review of how scanned files are stored, validated and published across at least nine government departments.

The timing is pointed. Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's administration has staked significant political capital on the Delhi Digital Mission, a program launched in March 2024 that promised to eliminate paper-based bottlenecks and put citizen services on a single, clean online portal. Duplicate images — photographs of identity documents, property maps, and project blueprints that were scanned multiple times and uploaded without deduplication checks — undermine the credibility of that system at precisely the moment the AAP government needs it to look functional ahead of civic elections.

What Went Wrong, and Where

The problem is concentrated in two specific workflow bottlenecks. The Pragati Maidan-based Delhi Secretariat's document digitisation centre, which handles bulk scanning for heritage files from Old Delhi's Daryaganj revenue records, and the Indraprastha Estate government office cluster near ITO both uploaded large batches of scanned images between November 2025 and February 2026 without running hash-based deduplication software that had been specified in the original procurement contract. The software, sourced from a Noida-based vendor under a ₹3.2 crore contract signed in January 2024, was installed but apparently never configured correctly on the scanning workstations.

Sources familiar with the audit — who spoke on condition they not be named because the review is ongoing — said the duplicate images are not simply redundant files. Several of them appear in citizen-facing portals, meaning that property owners in areas like Karol Bagh and Rohini who applied for building plan approvals online received documentation packets containing the wrong photographs attached to their files. At least 340 such cases have been identified so far, according to internal correspondence reviewed by this newspaper.

The Municipal Corporation of Delhi confirmed on Thursday that it has pulled offline a batch-upload feature from its e-Nagar Palika portal — a system used daily by tens of thousands of residents — while engineers work through the backlog. The portal, which processes an average of 9,800 citizen requests per day during peak periods, will operate in a limited mode until at least July 14.

Data Integrity and What Comes Next

Independent assessments of similar digitisation drives elsewhere in India suggest the scale is not unusual but the detection timeline is. The National Informatics Centre has documented that large-scale government scanning exercises without mandatory deduplication pipelines generate duplicate-rate errors of between 8 and 12 percent of total uploaded files. Delhi's audit is currently showing a rate just above 6 percent — lower than the national benchmark but still significant given the volume of records involved.

The Department of Administrative Reforms has issued a directive requiring all department heads to submit a corrective action plan by July 18. The directive specifically mandates that the Noida vendor provide on-site engineers to reconfigure the deduplication software at the Secretariat scanning centre within ten working days. Departments that fail to comply risk having their digitisation budgets frozen for the third quarter of the financial year.

For residents who submitted documents through the e-Nagar Palika portal between November 2025 and June 2026, the MCD has set up a dedicated helpline — reachable at the civic body's Civic Centre office on Minto Road — where file reference numbers can be verified for accuracy. Officials say citizens whose files contain mismatched images will be contacted directly and asked to resubmit the relevant photographs through a new, verified upload channel. No fees will be charged for resubmission. The full audit report is expected to be tabled before the Delhi Assembly's Public Accounts Committee before the end of July.