Delhi's MCD Launches Crackdown on Duplicate Property Images in Digital Records This Week

The Municipal Corporation of Delhi confirmed this week that its GIS and Property Tax Department had flagged over 14,000 duplicate geo-tagged images across its digital property database — errors that have reportedly led to incorrect assessments, double-billing complaints, and delayed clearances for construction permits in at least a dozen wards. The disclosure came after an internal audit completed on July 2 was circulated to senior civic officials.

The timing matters. Delhi is in the middle of implementing Phase 4 of the Metro expansion, and the MCD's digital property records are directly linked to land acquisition and right-of-way approvals along the Janakpuri West to RK Ashram corridor. Bad image data in the mapping system slows those approvals down. It also feeds into the Yamuna floodplain encroachment monitoring effort that the Delhi government has been running since the 2023 floods caused over Rs 500 crore in documented damage to low-lying colonies near the river.

Where the Problem Showed Up

Field engineers working under the MCD's Central Zone — covering areas from Karol Bagh to Paharganj — first noticed the anomalies in May when two separate plots on Ramjas Road were returning identical rooftop imagery despite being structurally distinct buildings with different owners. A review then widened to South Zone, where colonies in Malviya Nagar and Saket showed similar duplicate entries in the Unified Building Byelaws portal maintained jointly by the Delhi Development Authority and MCD.

The duplicates appear to stem from a 2023 bulk upload of satellite imagery procured from a third-party vendor as part of a Rs 38-crore digital mapping contract. During that upload, automated scripts failed to run proper de-duplication checks before pushing images to the live records system. That vendor contract, awarded in October 2023, had a data quality clause — but enforcement was apparently not monitored. The MCD's IT wing has now isolated 14,312 confirmed duplicate image entries across 21 of the 32 wards it audited in Phase 1 of the review.

For ordinary residents, the consequences have been concrete and frustrating. Owners of properties in areas like Shahpur Jat and Lajpat Nagar Part II have been receiving automated property tax demand notices based on assessed plot sizes that don't match ground reality — because the system was pulling dimensions from the wrong image file. The MCD's own helpline, 155305, logged a 34 percent spike in property-record-related complaints between January and June this year compared to the same period in 2025.

What Officials Are Doing About It

The MCD's Commissioner-level office issued an internal circular on July 3 directing all zonal offices to freeze new image uploads until a replacement verification protocol is in place. Under the new protocol, any geo-tagged image added to the system will require a hash-based duplicate check — a standard data management technique — before it is accepted into the live database. The IT department has been given a 45-day deadline, putting the revised system online by mid-August.

The Delhi government's Dialogue and Development Commission, which has been separately building a digital twin of the city for urban planning purposes, has offered to share its own verified aerial imagery dataset — captured via drone surveys in 2025 — to help plug the gaps left by the bad vendor data. Those drone images cover approximately 89 percent of Delhi's built-up area and are considered more reliable for ground-level property boundary work.

Property owners who believe their tax assessments may have been affected should file a correction request through the MCD's eSamadhan portal before August 31, which the civic body has set as the deadline for the current rectification window. Those living near Delhi Metro Phase 4 sites along the Tughlakabad or Aerocity extensions should also verify their property records directly at their ward office, since those corridors have the highest density of flagged entries in the audit. Getting that paperwork right before the Phase 4 land acquisition process accelerates this winter will save months of bureaucratic back-and-forth later.