Delhi's War on Duplicate Images in Public Records: How the Capital Compares to Mumbai, London and Seoul

Delhi's municipal agencies are sitting on a quiet crisis. Tens of thousands of property records, voter ID files and ration card databases held by bodies including the Delhi Development Authority and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi contain duplicate photographs — the same image appearing against multiple identities, or a single person registered under several files with different photos scanned from photocopies. The problem has been known for years. The pressure to fix it intensified after the MCD's 2024-25 house tax digitisation drive pushed more than 1.8 million property entries onto a single unified portal, where image duplication errors became visible at scale for the first time.

The timing matters. Delhi is two years into Phase 4 of its Metro expansion, which requires fresh land acquisition notices tied to verified ownership records in corridors running through Janakpuri West, Krishna Park Extension and Tughlakpur. Duplicate images in the DDA's land parcel database have, according to civil engineers and legal professionals working on acquisition cases, repeatedly complicated the verification process — forcing manual re-checks that slow down compensation payouts. The MCD declined to provide a specific figure for the number of duplicated image entries when approached for this article.

What Delhi Is Doing — and Where It Is Falling Short

The MCD launched an internal deduplication audit in January 2026 using hash-matching software to flag identical image files across its property tax database. The effort is based at the civic body's IT cell at the Civic Centre on Minto Road. Hash-matching is a standard first pass: it catches exact pixel-for-pixel copies but misses near-duplicates — scanned versions of the same physical photograph, images cropped differently, or pictures re-photographed on a phone before upload. That last category is widespread in Old Delhi localities like Ballimaran and Matia Mahal, where shopkeepers and residents often submit documentation via mobile scans of ageing paper files.

Compare that to Seoul. South Korea's Ministry of the Interior deployed a perceptual hashing system — more computationally expensive than basic hash-matching but capable of catching visually similar images even when the files differ technically — across its national resident registration database starting in 2022. By 2024, the ministry reported clearing over 340,000 duplicate image flags from a database of roughly 51 million entries. Delhi's population exceeds 32 million, and the MCD portal alone covers the National Capital Territory's 272 wards, but no equivalent public audit figure has been released.

Mumbai's Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation ran a comparable exercise for its Aadhaar-linked property records between 2023 and 2025, cross-referencing images with the Unique Identification Authority of India's biometric database to eliminate duplicates at source. That approach works cleanly when residents have Aadhaar numbers linked to accurate photographs — but Delhi's older resettlement colonies, including clusters around Seemapuri and Trilokpuri in East Delhi, have significant populations whose Aadhaar photographs are out of date or were enrolled from poor-quality originals.

London's Land Registry, for its part, does not rely on personal photographs at all for property ownership records, using instead a title number and cadastral map system that eliminates the image-duplication problem entirely from the property side. That structural difference means the comparison has limits — but it does raise a question about whether Delhi's document-heavy photograph requirement for property tax and tenancy records is itself the root of the problem.

What Happens Next for Delhi Residents

For anyone with pending property transfer applications at sub-registrar offices in Tis Hazari or Karkardooma, the practical advice from legal professionals familiar with the system is to submit fresh, high-resolution photographs with every new application rather than relying on images already on file — the deduplication audit has, in some cases, temporarily frozen records flagged as duplicates pending manual review. The MCD's unified portal at mcdonline.nic.in does allow residents to update photograph records directly, a function added in the February 2026 portal upgrade.

The DDA has separately indicated it plans to integrate Aadhaar-based facial recognition into its land record verification workflow before the end of the 2026-27 financial year, though no official implementation date has been confirmed publicly. Until that integration is complete, the gap between what Delhi's digitisation ambition promises and what its image-management infrastructure can actually deliver remains the central problem for anyone whose legal records are caught in the backlog.