Delhi's Duplicate Image Problem: How the Capital Stacks Up Against Mumbai, London and Seoul

Delhi's Revenue Department has been working through a backlog of mis-scanned and duplicated property record images embedded in its digitisation drive — a bureaucratic tangle that has delayed mutation certificates for hundreds of applicants at sub-divisional offices across the city, including those in Shahdara and South Delhi districts. The problem is neither new nor unique to the capital, but the scale here is significant: Delhi's municipal area covers roughly 1,484 square kilometres and its land-record database, managed partly under the Delhi Land Records Computerisation project, holds millions of individual document scans accumulated over two decades.

The issue matters right now because Phase 4 of the Delhi Metro expansion is accelerating land acquisition in corridors from Janakpuri West to RK Ashram Marg, and every disputed or duplicated document image in the Revenue Department's system creates a potential bottleneck in compensation processing. Property owners in areas such as Tughlaqabad and Vikaspuri have reported delays of several months at their local patwari offices when title searches return more than one scan for the same khasra number — a direct consequence of duplicate image entries that were uploaded during batch-scanning exercises between 2018 and 2023.

How Other Cities Are Tackling the Same Headache

Mumbai offers the clearest domestic comparison. The Maharashtra government's Department of Registration and Stamps rolled out an automated duplicate-detection module within its iSarita 2.0 platform in 2024, using hash-based image fingerprinting to flag identical or near-identical files before they are committed to the permanent record. The state government publicly reported at the time that the pilot across Pune and Nashik districts caught duplicate uploads at a rate that justified full statewide deployment. Delhi has no equivalent automated filter publicly documented in its current workflow.

Internationally, Seoul's Ministry of the Interior and Safety integrated AI-assisted image deduplication into its integrated land information system — known locally as KLIS — as part of a wider e-government modernisation push completed in 2022. The South Korean capital, which manages property records for roughly 10 million residents across 25 autonomous districts, processed its backlog by running nightly batch jobs that compared image checksums and flagged anomalies for human review. London's HM Land Registry, serving one of the world's highest-volume property markets, has for several years used automated duplicate-document detection as part of its Digital Registration Service, introduced in stages from 2021 onwards.

Delhi's nodal agency for land records, the Delhi State Spatial Data Infrastructure — operating under the Revenue Department at the ITO complex — has not published a comparable technical specification for its current deduplication approach. The department's public-facing portal, known as the Delhi Land Records portal, allows citizens to retrieve jamabandi records online, but officials at tehsil offices in areas including Mehrauli and Najafgarh have acknowledged to property lawyers that manual verification remains the de facto check when duplicates are suspected.

What Needs to Happen Next

Property lawyers practising at the Tis Hazari district court complex have pointed out that duplicate image entries create direct legal exposure: when two scans of nominally the same document differ in even minor detail — a blurred stamp, a missing endorsement — opposing parties in ownership disputes can exploit the discrepancy. The problem is compounded in Old Delhi localities like Ballimaran and Matia Mahal, where paper records are older and the scanning quality more variable.

The practical fix, as demonstrated in Mumbai and Seoul, costs less than a full system overhaul. Hash-based deduplication can be layered onto an existing database without replacing the underlying architecture. The Delhi government's IT department, which operates from Indraprastha Estate, has the technical capacity; the question is whether it prioritises the fix before Metro Phase 4 land acquisition reaches its most contentious phases, expected through 2027. Citizens filing mutation applications in the meantime should request a certified printout of every document retrieved under their khasra number and flag any visual discrepancy to the sub-divisional magistrate in writing — a procedural step that creates a paper trail if a duplicate surfaces later in a title dispute.