'My Identity Documents Just Vanished': Delhi Residents Caught in the Government's Duplicate Image Purge

At a cramped Common Service Centre on Chandni Chowk's Nai Sarak, a queue of roughly 40 people had already formed by 9 a.m. on Thursday. Most were there for the same reason: their biometric profiles had been flagged during the Union government's ongoing deduplication exercise, which cross-checks facial images across Aadhaar, ration card and voter ID databases. For many of the men and women waiting in that queue, the flag meant their photograph had been replaced with a blank placeholder — and with it, access to subsidised food, pension disbursements and, in some cases, bank accounts had stalled.

The deduplication drive, run through the Unique Identification Authority of India, has been underway in phases since early 2025. Its stated purpose is to eliminate ghost entries and multiple identities drawing on welfare schemes simultaneously. Delhi, with its enormous migrant population and decades of piecemeal enrollment drives, has emerged as one of the cities producing the highest volume of flagged records. According to figures cited by the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology in a parliamentary standing committee submission in March 2026, Delhi accounted for roughly 8.3 lakh records under active deduplication review across all three major identity databases at that point.

Families in Mustafabad and Trilokpuri Feel the Pinch Hardest

The human cost is concentrated in working-class settlements. In Mustafabad, in northeast Delhi, residents who enrolled in Aadhaar during post-2013 camps run through the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board say they received no written notice before their images were replaced. A vegetable seller from Block C described travelling twice to the Nand Nagri enrollment centre, only to be told the correction had to be initiated from a different portal. He eventually reached the Seemapuri Post Office Passport Seva Kendra after being redirected three times. The round trip cost him two days of wages.

In Trilokpuri, community workers attached to the Indraprastha Gas-funded digital literacy project that operates out of the local community hall say they have been informally helping residents navigate the UIDAI grievance portal since February. The centre recorded 214 walk-in cases between February 1 and June 15, 2026, according to a register reviewed by The Daily Delhi. Of those, 61 were still unresolved by the end of June — meaning the resident's image remained flagged and at least one linked service was still inaccessible.

Delhi's ration distribution network compounds the problem. The Delhi Food and Civil Supplies Department links ration card biometrics to point-of-sale machines at fair price shops. When an image is in dispute, the system can reject a fingerprint match even if the underlying Aadhaar number is valid, because the image mismatch triggers a secondary verification hold. Several fair price shop owners in the Lal Kuan area of Old Delhi confirmed they had been manually overriding transactions for affected customers at the rate of several per week, logging them as exceptions — a workaround that works only for some categories of entitlements and not for cash transfers or pension credits.

What Residents Can Do Right Now

UIDAI's official grievance mechanism — accessible at resident.uidai.gov.in — allows affected individuals to raise a ticket citing a duplicate image flag. Residents should carry their original enrollment receipt, any prior Aadhaar update acknowledgement slip and a self-attested photograph when visiting a designated Aadhaar Seva Kendra. The nearest centre for central Delhi residents is at Pragati Maidan's Hall No. 7, which handles walk-in corrections on Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m.

The Delhi government's Jahan Jhuggi Wahan Makaan housing office at ITO has also begun coordinating with UIDAI for residents living in resettlement colonies where original enrollment records are fragmented. Activists working with the Right to Food Campaign, which has been documenting welfare access disruptions in Delhi since 2004, are urging the state government to press UIDAI for a ward-level resolution camp modelled on the 2019 Voter ID photo correction exercise, when Delhi's Chief Electoral Officer deployed 272 block-level officers across the city in a single fortnight. No such camp has been announced yet for the biometric deduplication backlog, but pressure from multiple MLAs — particularly those representing constituencies in northeast and east Delhi — is mounting as the monsoon session of the Delhi Assembly approaches in late July.