'My Identity Papers Were Erased': Delhi Residents Speak Out on Duplicate Image Replacement in Official Records

At least three dozen residents of the Seemapuri resettlement colony have spent the better part of 2026 shuttling between the Delhi Government's e-District portal and local SDM offices after their Aadhaar-linked ration card photographs were replaced with images belonging to strangers — a glitch that has left families unable to draw subsidised grain under the National Food Security Act since February.

The problem is not isolated to one database or one neighbourhood. Across Delhi, a wave of complaints has surfaced in the wake of back-end data migration work carried out as part of the Delhi State Government's push to consolidate citizen records onto a single digital platform, a project overseen by the Department of IT. Duplicate image replacement — where one resident's photograph is overwritten by another's during batch uploads or de-duplication sweeps — has quietly disrupted access to everything from property mutation certificates in South Delhi's Saket to voter ID cards flagged as invalid in Mustafabad.

Where the System Is Breaking Down

The Chandni Chowk area offers a concentrated example of the disorder. Traders registered under the Delhi Shops and Establishments Act have found that their GST-linked business identity documents now carry mismatched photographs following an integration exercise between the MCD's property tax records and the state's unified citizen portal. The Vyapar Mandal in Khari Baoli, a wholesale spice market lane running off Chandni Chowk, has reportedly been receiving complaints from members since March, according to local journalists covering the area. No official count has been released publicly.

In Rohini's Sector 16, residents applying for property mutation at the North Delhi Municipal zone office have been turned away after clerks flagged that the photograph on their submitted documents did not match the image stored in the central registry — even when the applicant was standing in front of the officer with original papers in hand. The disconnect traces back to a de-duplication algorithm meant to eliminate fake entries, which in several documented cases matched faces incorrectly and replaced legitimate photographs with those of entirely different people.

Community workers at the Jahangirpuri-based Adhikar Foundation, a legal aid NGO that assists marginalised residents with document rectification, say the volume of photograph mismatch cases referred to them rose sharply after the Delhi government's Unified Citizen Services upgrade went live in January 2026. The Foundation has publicly stated it is tracking the issue, though no specific caseload figure has been confirmed through an official published source.

What Residents Are Being Told to Do

The procedural advice from SDM offices is largely consistent: file a self-declaration affidavit, get it notarised — which costs between ₹100 and ₹300 at most notary offices near Tis Hazari Courts — and then reapply through the e-District Delhi portal with a fresh biometric verification request. In practice, residents say the system rejects re-uploads when the existing incorrect image is still live in the master database, creating a circular error that cannot be resolved at the local office level.

The Delhi Legal Services Authority (DLSA), which operates through its district centres including the one at Patiala House Courts in Central Delhi, has the statutory mandate to provide free legal assistance in exactly these kinds of administrative disputes. Citizens facing document-linked denial of benefits can approach the nearest DLSA centre to file a formal rectification complaint, which then goes directly to the relevant department head rather than cycling through front-counter staff.

The Unique Identification Authority of India, which administers Aadhaar, has a separate online grievance mechanism at resident.uidai.gov.in where photograph correction requests can be lodged; walk-in Aadhaar centres at select post offices — including the Head Post Office on Parliament Street in New Delhi — handle biometric updates by appointment. Residents affected by downstream errors in state databases, however, must separately approach each department, meaning a single photograph glitch can require four or five separate correction filings before a person's identity is restored across all linked systems.

Until the state's IT Department releases a formal audit of how many records were affected during the January migration, residents and legal aid workers are essentially mapping the problem street by street.