How Delhi's Public Record System Got Buried Under Duplicate Images — and How We Got Here

Delhi's municipal digitisation project, launched with considerable fanfare under the Smart Cities Mission in 2016, is now confronting a problem nobody planned for: an estimated one-third of all scanned documents stored across the three former Municipal Corporation of Delhi zones are believed to be duplicate image files — the same birth certificate, property deed, or ration card photographed twice, sometimes three times, by different scanning contractors working from the same physical stack. The result is a bloated, slow-to-search archive that has frustrated residents trying to access civic services at ward offices from Rohini to Sarita Vihar.

The issue matters acutely right now because the unified Municipal Corporation of Delhi — reconstituted in May 2022 after the merger of the north, south, and east bodies — set a July 2026 internal deadline to migrate all legacy records onto a single unified digital platform. That deadline is, as of this week, functionally missed. The duplicate image problem is the primary technical bottleneck cited by officials working on the migration, though no formal public statement has been issued by the MCD acknowledging the delay.

How the Duplication Happened

The roots of the problem stretch back to at least 2014, when the then-trifurcated MCD bodies each began separate digitisation drives under pressure from the central government's Digital India programme. The North MCD, responsible for areas including Narela and Civil Lines, hired one set of vendors. The South MCD, covering Hauz Khas and Mehrauli, hired another. Neither system used a shared de-duplication protocol — a basic software check that flags when an identical or near-identical image has already been uploaded.

By 2018, the Delhi government's own IT Department flagged the overlap in an internal note reviewed by this reporter, describing the lack of coordination between the MCD bodies and the Delhi Secretariat's e-District portal as a structural gap. At least two state-level committees were constituted to address interoperability between the e-District system — which handles certificates and grievances — and the MCD's property-tax and birth-registration databases. Neither committee produced binding technical standards before the corporation merger overtook the process.

The National Informatics Centre, which provides technical backbone to both the e-District portal and several MCD subsystems, has been part of discussions about a unified image-hashing standard since at least 2021, according to procurement documents available through the Delhi government's open-data portal. A tender floated in March 2023 for a deduplication and records-cleaning exercise was awarded to a Gurugram-based firm, but that contract — worth approximately Rs 4.2 crore — was reported as incomplete when the MCD conducted a performance review in December 2025.

What This Means on the Ground

For residents, the practical consequences show up at the counter. At the MCD's Karol Bagh Zone office on Pusa Road, where property mutation requests are processed, staff have described — without being named — a routine where the same document surfaces multiple times in a search result, requiring a clerk to manually verify which version is current. The Shahdara South Zone office has faced similar complaints from residents seeking property tax receipts ahead of the current financial year's first quarter deadline of June 30.

The problem also has a cost attached to it. Storage contracts for government cloud infrastructure, routed through the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology's MeghRaj cloud platform, are billed partly by data volume. Redundant files mean the MCD is paying to store data it does not need — though the exact excess billing figure has not been independently verified.

For residents needing records urgently, the MCD advises visiting zonal offices in person with original documents rather than relying solely on the online portal while the backend cleanup is underway. The Unified MCD has indicated it expects a revised technical roadmap by September 2026. Until then, the archive that was supposed to modernise civic life in the capital will remain, in part, a digital version of the same paper chaos it was meant to replace.