Delhi's War on Duplicate Images: How the Capital Stacks Up Against Mumbai, London and Seoul

Delhi's Municipal Corporation launched a formal audit in March 2026 to track and remove duplicate digital images from its public-facing portals, property tax databases and urban planning records — a bureaucratic housekeeping exercise that has quietly become a test case for how large, chaotic cities manage visual data at scale. The trigger was a backlog of roughly 40,000 flagged image entries in the MCD's integrated property mapping system, many of them duplicates created when ward-level offices uploaded the same site photographs multiple times across overlapping legacy databases.

The problem is not trivial. Duplicate images in civic databases slow down land-use verification, clog grievance portals and, in some cases, have been linked to disputes over property demarcation in dense zones like Shahjahanabad and Karol Bagh, where a single lane might have dozens of overlapping ownership records. The MCD's IT department, working out of its Civic Centre headquarters on Minto Road, has been running a deduplication script across its servers since April, cross-referencing image metadata against GPS coordinates logged during field surveys.

Where Delhi Stands Globally

Mumbai's Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation ran a comparable exercise in 2024, targeting its building plan approval system, and took approximately eight months to clear a backlog that municipal records described as running into tens of thousands of duplicate files. Delhi's timeline is tighter — the MCD has set a September 2026 deadline for the first phase — but the city is working with a property database that covers over 14 million units, making the computational load significantly heavier.

London's equivalent challenge sits with the Greater London Authority's planning portal, which moved to an automated image deduplication system in 2022 after a Freedom of Information request revealed duplicate submissions were inflating processing times for planning applications by an estimated 18 percent. Seoul's Smart City Division, operating out of the Digital Media City complex in Mapo, has been held up as a benchmark: the South Korean capital integrated AI-based image hashing into its urban data pipeline in 2023, cutting duplicate entries by what city officials described in public documents as more than 70 percent within twelve months. Delhi's current system is hash-based but not yet AI-assisted, a gap that the MCD's IT procurement team is reportedly trying to close before the next budget cycle.

The Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board is separately wrestling with the same issue across its resettlement colony records, where photographs of jhuggi clusters in areas like Bhalswa and Seemapuri were duplicated across three separate departmental databases over nearly a decade of piecemeal digitisation. DUSIB officials have not issued a public timeline for resolving those records, but the board confirmed in a June 2026 press statement that a data reconciliation exercise was underway.

Why This Matters Beyond the Bureaucracy

For ordinary Delhiites, the consequence of unresolved duplicates is tangible. Property owners in Old Delhi have reported delays of up to six weeks in getting no-objection certificates when their addresses appear under multiple image entries in the MCD system, each with slightly different metadata. The Delhi High Court, in a 2025 order relating to a property dispute in Civil Lines, noted that conflicting photographic records from municipal databases had complicated the evidentiary record — a signal, legal observers say, that the courts are paying attention.

The AAP government has folded the deduplication push into its broader e-governance agenda, connecting it to the Chief Minister's Dashboard project that tracks service delivery metrics across 70 municipal services. Opposition BJP councillors on the MCD have criticised the pace of progress, though both sides agree the underlying infrastructure problem predates the current administration by at least fifteen years.

What happens next depends partly on funding. The MCD's IT budget for fiscal year 2026-27, tabled in February, allocated Rs 47 crore to digital infrastructure upgrades, of which a portion is earmarked for the deduplication and database consolidation work. If the September phase-one deadline is met, the second phase — covering satellite imagery layers used in the Yamuna floodplain mapping project — is scheduled to begin in January 2027. Residents with pending property queries at ward offices in Chandni Chowk, Rohini and Dwarka have been advised to carry both digital and physical copies of ownership documents until the reconciliation is complete.