Delhi's Civic Agencies Under Pressure to Fix Duplicate Image Crisis in Property and ID Records, Officials Say

Tens of thousands of Delhi property files held by the Municipal Corporation of Delhi contain duplicate or mismatched photographs, according to civic officials familiar with the digitisation backlog — a problem that has stalled title transfers, blocked home loan approvals, and left residents shuttling between offices in Rohini, Dwarka, and Civil Lines for months at a stretch.

The issue has sharpened because the MCD's unified property tax portal, merged under a single administrative body in May 2022, is still reconciling records from three predecessor corporations. Duplicate scanned images — where the same owner photograph appears against multiple property IDs, or where passport-size photos were simply copied across entries during manual data entry — are now surfacing as the back-end database is cleaned ahead of a planned Phase 2 upgrade expected before the end of 2026.

What Officials and Experts Are Saying

Senior MCD officials have acknowledged the scale of the problem in internal departmental reviews, though no formal public statement quantifying the affected files has been released. Technology policy researchers at the Centre for Internet and Society, which has previously studied India's civic digitisation programs, have noted that bulk scanning of legacy paper records without structured metadata protocols routinely produces exactly this kind of image duplication. The problem is not unique to Delhi: similar issues surfaced in Bengaluru's BBMP property records between 2019 and 2021 before a targeted correction drive cleared the backlog.

At the Delhi Secretariat on IP Estate, officials handling the voter list de-duplication drive — running under the Election Commission of India's ERMS platform — have pointed to a related but distinct challenge: Aadhaar-linked photographs pulled from UIDAI records do not always match the images stored in the legacy Electoral Photo Identity Card database. Where the two images diverge, the software flags the entry for manual review, creating a secondary queue that election office staff in all 11 Delhi districts are now working through ahead of any possible assembly by-election cycle.

Experts in civic technology have argued that the root cause is a procurement model that rewarded vendors for volume of scanned pages rather than data integrity. Contracts awarded under the Delhi e-District project, which processes certificates and records across 33 service categories, historically did not include image-validation clauses, according to procurement documents reviewed by civil society groups. That gap means errors propagated across systems rather than being caught at point of entry.

What Residents Are Being Told to Do

For property owners, the MCD's Property Tax department has opened a dedicated grievance window at its Civic Centre headquarters on Minto Road, where residents can submit a physical affidavit alongside a fresh passport-size photograph to trigger a manual override on duplicated records. The process takes between 15 and 45 working days, officials say, and does not require a lawyer — though many Karol Bagh and Lajpat Nagar residents have reported hiring document facilitators charging between ₹500 and ₹2,000 to navigate the paperwork.

The MCD has also said an automated image-matching algorithm, contracted to a Noida-based firm as part of the broader property tax portal upgrade, will begin bulk-flagging duplicate entries by September 2026. Officials say the algorithm compares photographs using facial-recognition scoring and cross-references them against the unique property ID number rather than owner name alone — a change intended to catch cases where two properties share the same owner photograph because of a clerical copy-paste error during the 2022 merger.

For voter roll discrepancies, the Electoral Registration Officers at the district level in areas including Shahdara and South-West Delhi have been instructed to prioritise cases where the mismatch has caused a voter's entry to be suppressed entirely from the published roll. Residents who believe their photograph has been incorrectly duplicated or replaced can file Form 8 at the nearest Electoral Registration Office or through the Voter Helpline number 1950, which has been operational continuously since January 2026.

The practical advice from civic technology advocates is straightforward: check your MCD property record and your voter ID entry online now, before the correction windows close in the fourth quarter of 2026. Waiting until a transaction — a home sale, a loan, a new registration — forces the issue means entering a correction queue that is already months long.