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

Delhi's major civic databases — from the Delhi Development Authority's land-record portals to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi's property tax system — contain tens of thousands of duplicate or misattributed property photographs, a problem that is quietly derailing verification processes for residents trying to register homes, settle estate disputes, and access government welfare schemes. The issue has grown acute enough that multiple ward offices across East Delhi and South Delhi have begun flagging backlogs that run into thousands of unresolved property image queries.

The timing matters. Delhi Metro Rail Corporation is mid-way through Phase 4 expansion, which involves land acquisition and resettlement documentation across corridors including the Janakpuri West–RK Ashram Marg stretch. Accurate photographic records tied to property identifiers are a legal requirement at every acquisition stage. When duplicate images contaminate those records — the same photograph attached to two different plot numbers, or an image from Rohini misfiled under a Dwarka address — the paperwork chain collapses, disputes multiply, and compensation disbursement stalls.

What Delhi Is Doing — And What It Isn't

The MCD merged its three legacy corporations into a unified body in May 2022, a restructuring that was meant to modernise data management. Four years on, the unified corporation still operates legacy image databases that were never fully deduplicated before the merger. The DDA's AWAAS portal, through which citizens check housing allotment status, has carried known duplicate image entries for at least three financial years, according to complaints logged on the central government's CPGRAMS grievance platform — a publicly accessible record.

Contrast that with Mumbai, where the Maharashtra government pushed a structured image deduplication exercise across the city survey office between 2023 and 2025, using perceptual hash matching tools applied to nearly 1.4 million cadastral photographs. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation announced the exercise formally and set a completion benchmark. Delhi has launched no equivalent public program.

London's Land Registry completed a bulk digital image audit across its 26 million registered titles back in 2021, investing £4.2 million in automated duplicate detection software. Seoul's Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport runs a continuous real-time deduplication layer across its KRAS property registration system, flagging anomalies within 48 hours of upload. Delhi, by comparison, still relies substantially on manual review at ward level — a process that, in a city of 33 million people and millions of registered properties, is structurally inadequate.

Ground-Level Impact in Chandni Chowk and Beyond

The effects are most visible in Old Delhi, where property boundaries in areas like Chandni Chowk, Ballimaran, and Matia Mahal are already contested and poorly digitised. Heritage conservation work coordinated through the Archaeological Survey of India's Delhi circle office has also been hampered when site photographs submitted for listing consideration turn out to match images already attached to different monument files — slowing decisions on protection status.

The National Informatics Centre, which provides technical backbone to multiple Delhi government portals, has the institutional capacity to run deduplication at scale. A pilot for automated image matching was reportedly referenced in NIC's 2024-25 annual report, though no Delhi-specific rollout date was published in that document. The Aam Aadmi Party government's push to expand digital services — the Mukhyamantri Digital Seva initiative has registered over 60 lakh beneficiaries since its launch — has added pressure on backend data quality without a corresponding investment in cleaning legacy image repositories.

For residents, the practical advice is blunt: if you are filing a property mutation, inheritance transfer, or DDA housing complaint that requires photographic verification, submit your own high-resolution, geo-tagged images directly through the relevant portal rather than relying on database photographs you cannot audit. Save confirmation receipts with timestamps. If a duplicate image error appears in your case file, lodge a formal CPGRAMS complaint with the specific property ID number — cases with that level of specificity move faster through the MCD system than generic grievances. The broader fix requires institutional will Delhi has not yet demonstrated, but individual cases with clean documentation stand a far better chance of resolution.