'My Documents Were Deleted Overnight': Delhi Residents Speak Out on Duplicate Image Replacement Crisis

The complaint registers at two of Delhi's busiest citizen service centres — the Pragati Maidan Integrated Facilitation Centre and the Lok Nayak Bhavan office in ITO — have been filling steadily since late May with a particular kind of grievance. Residents arriving to update Aadhaar-linked records, ration cards, or voter ID photographs are discovering that automated deduplication software running on the Delhi government's e-District portal has flagged their images as duplicates and replaced them with photographs belonging to different individuals. For those affected, the consequences range from bureaucratic delay to an outright freeze on accessing subsidised food rations.

The issue has sharpened in recent weeks partly because of the rollout of Phase 2 of the Delhi e-District 3.0 system, which the Department of Information Technology upgraded in April 2026. The upgraded platform introduced a machine-learning image-matching layer designed to prevent duplicate applications. Officials familiar with portal upgrades have previously acknowledged that facial-recognition deduplication tools carry error margins that widen when photographs are low-resolution or when applicants share similar features — a documented pattern in population-dense urban environments. For Delhi, a city of more than 20 million residents squeezed into 1,484 square kilometres, the margin of error translates into thousands of real cases.

Chandni Chowk to Sangam Vihar: Who Is Getting Hit

Residents from Old Delhi's Matia Mahal neighbourhood and from the unauthorised colony of Sangam Vihar in South Delhi have described nearly identical experiences. They submit a service request — a ration card renewal, a domicile certificate, a caste certificate for a child's school admission — and receive automated confirmation. Weeks later, when they return to collect the document or check its status online, they find their photograph has been substituted. In several cases logged with the Delhi Legal Services Authority, the replacement image belongs to a person of a different gender.

Sangam Vihar alone houses an estimated 10 lakh residents, most of them working-class families dependent on the Public Distribution System. The PDS provides subsidised wheat at Rs 2 per kilogram and rice at Rs 3 per kilogram under the National Food Security Act. A mismatched photograph on a ration card effectively suspends a family's access until the record is manually corrected — a process that, according to the Delhi government's own published service-level benchmarks, is supposed to take seven working days but in practice routinely stretches beyond that in high-demand circles. Circle 26, which covers parts of South Delhi including Khanpur and Devli, has recorded among the highest volumes of correction requests since May.

At Matia Mahal in Old Delhi — where the density of multi-generational families sharing similar surnames and sometimes strikingly similar facial features is high — the deduplication algorithm appears to be generating false matches at an elevated rate. Community paralegal workers attached to the Jamia Millia Islamia's Legal Aid Cell have been helping residents file grievance applications through the Centralised Grievance Redressal Management System, a process that requires a separate login, a scanned copy of the original photo ID, and often a trip to a Common Service Centre.

What Residents Can Do Right Now

The most direct route to correction currently runs through the CSC network. Delhi has more than 1,100 registered Common Service Centres across its 272 wards. Residents whose portal photographs have been incorrectly replaced should carry two forms of original photo identification — a physical Aadhaar card and a voter ID — when visiting a CSC, since the manual override process requires biometric re-verification. The National Informatics Centre, which manages the technical backbone of e-District nationally, has a helpline at 1800-111-555 that is toll-free from mobile and landline numbers.

For cases involving ration card disruption specifically, the Delhi Food and Supplies Department operates a dedicated grievance window at its Kiran Building headquarters near ITO, open on weekdays from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Applicants who have a case reference number from their original submission will move through that queue faster. Those without one should file an RTI application under the Right to Information Act 2005 to obtain the processing audit trail — a step that typically costs Rs 10 in court-fee stamps and forces a departmental response within 30 days. Until the e-District platform's deduplication logic is reviewed and its false-positive threshold adjusted, that paper trail may be the most reliable protection residents in Matia Mahal, Sangam Vihar, and a hundred neighbourhoods like them actually have.