Years of siloed digital systems, rushed digitisation drives, and no single file-naming standard left Delhi's public databases riddled with repeated photographs — and officials are only now reckoning with the scale of the problem.
The numbers are damning. An internal audit of digitised records held by the Delhi e-District portal — the Aam Aadmi Party government's flagship online services platform — found that a significant share of scanned citizen documents uploaded between 2018 and 2024 contained repeated or near-identical image files, stored under different names but occupying redundant server space. The audit, circulated within the Department of Information Technology, flagged the issue as a storage and verification liability ahead of a planned Phase 2 expansion of the portal's services.
The problem did not appear overnight. It is the product of at least a decade of competing digitisation pushes, each launched by a different agency with its own scanning vendor, its own file format, and no obligation to talk to any other department doing the same work across the city.
Delhi's digitisation story begins earnestly enough in the early 2010s, when the Municipal Corporation of Delhi — then still a single body before its 2012 trifurcation into north, south, and east zones — began scanning property tax records ward by ward. The Delhi Secretariat on IP Estate launched a parallel effort for land registry documents. The Delhi Police digitised FIR archives at the district level. Each initiative was well-intentioned. None of them shared a common image standard, a unified metadata schema, or a central repository.
When the AAP government consolidated many citizen-facing services under the e-District portal after 2015, it inherited this patchwork. Contractors hired to migrate older scanned files from legacy servers simply uploaded what they found, and automated deduplication tools — standard practice in most enterprise document management systems by 2016 — were not specified in the procurement contracts. The result: the same scanned ration card photograph, the same utility bill image, the same property boundary map appeared in the system under dozens of different file identifiers.
The Indraprastha Gas Limited billing office in Connaught Place and the South Delhi Municipal Corporation's online property tax portal at Civic Centre, Minto Road, both experienced service delays in 2023 that technical staff at the time attributed partly to bloated database queries caused by redundant files slowing retrieval times, according to publicly available Right to Information responses filed by resident welfare associations in those years.
The timing of the audit's wider circulation is not accidental. Delhi Metro Rail Corporation's Phase 4 expansion — covering corridors including Janakpuri West to RK Ashram Marg and Aerocity to Tughlakabad — is generating a fresh wave of land acquisition documents, environmental clearance scans, and displaced-resident records, all destined for government digital archives. Officials at the Urban Development Ministry have indicated that the Phase 4 documentation alone could run to several lakh individual scanned files by the time all six priority corridors are complete.
Inserting that volume of new material into a system already struggling with duplicate images is a genuine administrative risk. A single mismatched photograph attached to a compensation claim — because the system retrieved the wrong duplicate — could trigger legal challenges that delay payouts to families displaced from areas around Lajpat Nagar or Saket.
The broader context matters too. The Centre's Digital India programme has pushed states to migrate more services online. Delhi, as both a state and a union territory under constant political friction between the AAP administration and the BJP-led central government, faces particular scrutiny over how it manages shared digital infrastructure. A visible failure in document integrity would hand critics easy ammunition.
The e-District portal's own published data shows the platform handled over 80 lakh service requests in the financial year 2024-25 — a number that underlines just how much rides on the accuracy of the image files sitting behind each transaction. Officials familiar with the audit say a deduplification exercise using hash-matching software has been recommended, with a proposed deadline of March 2027. Whether procurement for that exercise clears the Lieutenant Governor's office in time is the next question administrators are watching closely.
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