How Delhi's Public Records Got Flooded With Duplicate Images — And Why Fixing It Has Taken Years

Delhi's three municipal corporations merged into one unified body — the Municipal Corporation of Delhi — in May 2022, and the digital chaos that followed is still being untangled. Among the least-discussed but most persistent problems to emerge from that consolidation: tens of thousands of duplicate image files, from property photographs to heritage documentation scans, scattered across incompatible server systems inherited from the old North, South, and East Delhi bodies.

The issue matters now because the Delhi government's push to digitise citizen services — accelerated under the e-District Delhi portal and the ongoing Smart City Mission allocations — has collided head-on with a legacy of poor file management. Civic tech officials working on the MCD's property tax digitisation drive have described internal backlogs where the same building photograph appears stored under three or four separate registration entries, creating verification errors that delay tax assessments and slow NOC approvals for construction projects across localities from Rohini to Lajpat Nagar.

How Three Databases Became One Very Large Problem

The roots of the problem stretch back to 2010, when each of the three predecessor corporations began independent digitisation efforts with no shared file-naming convention and no central image repository. The North Delhi Municipal Corporation contracted one vendor for scanning property records in areas like Sadar Bazaar and Karol Bagh. The South Delhi body ran a parallel exercise covering Hauz Khas and Malviya Nagar under a different technical specification entirely. When field surveyors uploaded photographs during door-to-door assessment drives, images were sometimes uploaded multiple times — once by the ward-level team, again by a zonal verification officer, and occasionally a third time during audit.

The Delhi Heritage Conservation Committee, which operates out of offices in the Indraprastha Estate complex near the ITO roundabout, faced an analogous headache in its own cataloguing work. Documentation photographs of protected structures along Chandni Chowk's main street and inside the Mehrauli Archaeological Park were digitised by at least two separate agencies between 2014 and 2019, with neither dataset cross-referenced against the other. The result, according to procedural review documents available on the Delhi government's open-data portal, was a catalogue containing an estimated 40 percent redundancy rate in image records for listed monuments.

The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, whose Phase 4 expansion is currently under construction along corridors including the Janakpuri West–Krishna Park Extension stretch, encountered a version of the same problem in its land acquisition documentation. Aerial survey images and ground-level photographs of affected plots along the Tughlakabad–Aerocity line were filed separately by survey teams and legal teams, producing duplicate entries that complicated compensation verification in at least 11 contested cases that moved before the Delhi High Court between 2021 and 2024.

The Cost of Letting It Drift

Storage is cheap; verification is not. The MCD's IT department, which operates its primary data centre in the Civic Centre building on Minto Road, began a formal deduplication audit in the second quarter of 2025 after an internal review found that roughly 2.3 terabytes of active server space was consumed by confirmed duplicate image files — capacity that was being paid for under a cloud-storage contract renewed in January 2025. The audit was mandated following recommendations in a Comptroller and Auditor General performance review of Delhi's e-governance infrastructure tabled before the Delhi Assembly in late 2024.

The AAP administration has pointed to the MCD merger itself as the structural cause, arguing that the previous three-body system — which persisted under BJP-dominated councils for nearly a decade — embedded the incompatibilities. The BJP's position, articulated in Assembly debates, has been that the AAP government had four years after the merger to resolve the problem and chose to prioritise headline infrastructure announcements instead. Neither claim has been independently verified by an outside audit body.

For residents and small business owners waiting on property-linked approvals — particularly traders in the congested lanes around Nai Sarak and Khari Baoli who depend on timely licence renewals — the practical advice is straightforward: when submitting documents through the MCD's online portal, use the portal's own photograph upload tool rather than email attachments, and retain the acknowledgement number generated at submission. The MCD's helpline, reachable at 155305, has been handling deduplication-related grievances since March 2026, and complaints logged with a reference number are being resolved within a stated 21-working-day window under the current pilot programme.