Delhi's Duplicate Image Problem: The Numbers That Expose a Crisis in Official Record-Keeping

At least 34 percent of image files uploaded to the Delhi Development Authority's public land records portal between January 2024 and March 2026 were flagged as exact or near-exact duplicates, according to an internal audit reviewed by The Daily Delhi. The finding has thrown into question the integrity of digitisation drives that cost the Delhi government crores of rupees and were presented as a cornerstone of administrative modernisation.

The timing matters. With Delhi Metro Phase 4 construction actively displacing residents and businesses across corridors from Janakpuri to Tughlakabad, land and property documentation has never been more consequential. A duplicated image — say, a single structure photograph filed under two different plot numbers in Rohini or Dwarka — can trigger legal disputes, delay compensation payouts, and stall resettlement proceedings for months.

What the Numbers Actually Show

The audit, conducted by an external technical team engaged by the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board, examined roughly 2.1 lakh image files across three civic databases. Of those, approximately 72,000 were duplicates — the same photograph appearing under different file references. Another 11,000 were classified as "near-duplicates": images taken of the same structure from marginally different angles, uploaded as distinct evidence records. The Urban Shelter Improvement Board serves a population of resettlement colony residents estimated at over 30 lakh people across the capital.

The problem is not unique to land records. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi's sanitation inspection portal, which requires field staff to upload photographic proof of drain clearances and waste collection runs, recorded a duplicate rate of close to 28 percent in the South Delhi zone between April 2025 and February 2026. Field inspections covering areas from Mehrauli to Okhla Industrial Area were among the worst affected. Critics have argued — though no formal action has yet been announced — that duplicate uploads allow supervisors to falsely certify completed work.

Even the Delhi Jal Board's Yamuna Action Plan III documentation, a project that has received significant political attention from both the AAP government at the state level and central ministry officials, contained image irregularities. A Right to Information response dated 14 May 2026, filed by a resident of Civil Lines, showed that 19 of 47 photographic annexures submitted for one stretch of the river between Wazirabad Barrage and the ITO bridge were duplicates of images already present in earlier quarterly reports.

Why Deduplication Has Lagged

Government digitisation projects in Delhi have historically prioritised upload volume over data quality. The DDA's land records portal was built under a contract awarded in 2019 with a budget of approximately Rs 41 crore. The original scope did not include automated hash-based deduplication — a standard feature in most enterprise document management systems that costs a fraction of the overall project value to implement. Subsequent change requests to add the feature were reportedly tabled and not approved before the portal went live.

The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, for its part, has a separate document management system for Phase 4 project files and told The Daily Delhi in a written statement that it runs quarterly data integrity checks. The corporation did not confirm whether image deduplication is part of those checks.

The Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology Delhi, based in Okhla Phase III, has been in preliminary discussions with at least one municipal agency about deploying a perceptual hashing tool that can scan large image repositories and flag duplicates in under four hours for a dataset of one lakh files. No contract has been signed as of the date of publication.

For residents whose property documents, resettlement records or Yamuna-adjacent compensation claims are tied to these portals, the practical advice is direct: request a certified physical copy of every image filed on your behalf and keep a timestamped record of submission dates. If a claim is delayed, file an RTI specifically asking for the unique file identifier of every image attached to your case — the response will quickly reveal whether duplication is the source of the hold-up. Delhi's RTI response deadline is 30 days under the Right to Information Act, 2005, and the State Information Commission on Tilak Marg handles first appeals within that jurisdiction.