How Delhi's Municipal Records Ended Up Flooded With Duplicate Images — and Who's Paying the Price

Delhi's three municipal corporations — unified under the single Municipal Corporation of Delhi banner since May 2022 — are sitting on an estimated 4.2 crore duplicate image files clogging government servers, according to internal audit documents reviewed by The Daily Delhi. Property tax records, building plan scans, ration card photographs and birth certificate attachments have been uploaded multiple times across incompatible systems, consuming storage capacity that the MCD itself values at roughly ₹18 crore in wasted infrastructure costs.

The problem did not emerge overnight. It is the direct result of more than a decade of patchwork digitisation — each successive administration launching its own portal, each portal capturing the same citizen documents afresh, none of them talking to the others. Understanding how Delhi arrived at this point requires going back to at least 2012, when the then-undivided MCD began scanning property records in Karol Bagh and Sadar Bazaar without any central deduplication protocol in place.

Three Corporations, Three Databases, One Catastrophe

Before the 2022 reunification, Delhi had three separate civic bodies — North, South and East MCD — each running its own digitisation scheme under different IT vendors. South MCD contracted a Gurugram-based firm to scan documents from its Hauz Khas and Saket zones starting in 2015. North MCD ran a parallel drive covering Rohini and Pitampura. East MCD handled Shahdara and Patparganj independently. When the central government pushed through the reunification legislation, nobody built a reconciliation layer. All three datasets were simply merged. Duplicates came along for the ride.

The AAP government's own e-District portal, launched under the Delhi Jal Board and Revenue Department umbrella, added another layer. Citizens applying for Yamuna water connection documents or domicile certificates in areas like Dwarka Sector 10 and Mustafabad were required to upload photographs and identity scans that already existed in MCD databases. The two systems never cross-referenced each other. By 2024, the Revenue Department's own internal IT cell flagged the redundancy in a note to the Chief Secretary's office, warning that storage on the National Informatics Centre servers allocated to Delhi was running at 73 percent capacity — with deduplication potentially recovering as much as 28 percent of that space.

Politics compounded the technical dysfunction. With BJP holding control of the reunified MCD through much of 2023 while Arvind Kejriwal's AAP ran the state government, decisions about shared IT infrastructure became bargaining chips. A proposed Unified Document Repository, which would have housed a single scanned copy of each citizen document under an Aadhaar-linked identifier, was cleared by the Delhi government's IT Department in March 2023 but stalled at the MCD commissioner's office for over fourteen months. Officials on both sides privately blamed the other for the delay.

What the Backlog Means for Ordinary Residents

The practical consequences land hardest on residents navigating property disputes or applying for welfare schemes. A family in Seelampur trying to transfer a property deed can find their documents flagged as inconsistent because a 2017 scan and a 2021 upload carry marginally different file names, triggering manual review queues that stretch to 90 days. The Delhi High Court received at least 340 petitions between January and June 2026 in which delayed civic record processing — tied in part to duplicate-file errors — was cited as a contributing factor, according to court registry data.

The MCD's current IT roadmap, tabled before the standing committee in April 2026, proposes a phased deduplication exercise using hash-matching software across all legacy databases, with a target completion date of March 2027. The project carries a tendered cost of ₹6.8 crore. Whether the timeline holds will depend heavily on whether the state government and the MCD can agree on data-sharing protocols — a negotiation that, given recent history, carries no guarantees. Citizens with pending property or welfare applications are advised to carry physical copies of all original documents to ward offices in Lajpat Nagar, Janakpuri or whichever zone covers their address, rather than relying solely on the online portal until the deduplication work is certified complete.