How Delhi's Digital Archives Ended Up Full of Duplicates — and Why Fixing It Has Taken Years

The problem started long before anyone called it a crisis. Through the early 2010s, successive Delhi administrations pushed hard to digitise land records, heritage documentation and civic files — a well-intentioned push that produced, by the mid-2020s, an estimated archive of several hundred terabytes of scanned images sitting across servers maintained by the Delhi State Archives on Tilak Marg and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi's IT wing in Civic Centre, Minto Road. A significant share of those files, according to internal audits reviewed by officials familiar with the process, were duplicates: the same document scanned twice, three times, sometimes more.

Why does this matter now? The AAP-led Delhi government has been attempting since early 2024 to build a unified citizen-services portal — one platform where residents can pull property records, birth certificates and ration card details without visiting a government office in person. Duplicate image files clog that system. They slow search queries, inflate storage costs and, in the worst cases, cause contradictory records to surface for the same plot of land or the same family's documents — exactly the kind of ambiguity that fuels property disputes in dense neighbourhoods like Shahdara and Sangam Vihar.

How the Duplication Happened

The roots of the problem lie in a structural quirk of Delhi's governance. Before the 2022 consolidation of the three municipal corporations into the unified MCD, the former North, South and East Delhi Municipal Corporations each ran independent digitisation drives, often contracting different vendors under different timelines. The Delhi Archives separately ran its own scanning programme. Nobody mandated a common file-naming convention or a deduplication check before upload. Files migrated from one server to another during administrative mergers and, in the process, were copied rather than moved — a basic IT error repeated at scale.

The Aam Aadmi Party government launched the Delhi e-District portal under the National e-Governance Plan framework, which required integrating state-level records with the central government's DigiLocker infrastructure. That integration, which began in earnest in late 2023, exposed the duplication problem in raw numbers for the first time. Officials working on the project discovered that in some ward-level property record sets, duplicate image rates ran as high as 30 to 40 per cent of total files — figures that made meaningful search and verification nearly impossible without manual intervention.

The Tilak Marg archive and the Minto Road MCD data centre are now at the centre of a replacement and reconciliation exercise that involves cross-referencing scanned images using hash-matching software — a technique that flags files with identical pixel fingerprints regardless of what they were named when uploaded. The exercise has been running since January 2025. Progress has been slow partly because older scans, many done on flatbed equipment by contract workers paid per page, were produced at inconsistent resolutions, meaning the same physical document might hash differently across two scans even though it contains identical information.

What Comes Next for Residents

The practical stakes are high for ordinary Delhiites. Property mutation requests in trans-Yamuna localities — areas like Laxmi Nagar and Mayur Vihar that saw rapid informal construction through the 1980s and 1990s — depend on clean, unambiguous scanned title chains. When duplicate or conflicting images exist in the system, clerks at the Revenue Department offices on I.P. Estate are required to route files for manual review, adding weeks to what should be a days-long process.

The MCD has indicated it plans to complete the deduplication exercise for the highest-priority record categories — property tax and building plan approvals — by the end of the current financial year, which closes in March 2027. After that, the remaining archival categories, including heritage-building documentation under the Delhi Urban Art Commission's records, are scheduled for the following cycle.

For residents with pending applications, the Revenue Department's helpline at the Delhi Secretariat in Civil Lines currently advises submitting original physical documents alongside any digital reference numbers — a workaround that underlines just how far the capital still has to go before its digital record systems can be trusted to stand on their own.