Delhi Government's Digital Archive Push Runs Into Duplicate Image Crisis This Week

A technical bottleneck has stalled one of Delhi's most ambitious digital governance drives. The Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board and the Heritage Conservation Committee, both operating under the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, confirmed this week that their joint digitisation project has accumulated tens of thousands of duplicate image files — scanned copies of property records, old survey maps and heritage-site photographs that were uploaded multiple times across different servers, creating a sprawling, unnavigable database that technicians are now racing to clean up.

The problem surfaced publicly when civic volunteers working with the Aga Khan Trust for Culture — which has been documenting the built fabric of Shahjahanabad, the walled city precinct around Lal Qila — flagged the discrepancy to MCD data officers. Their review found that a single lane in Gali Qasim Jan in Ballimaran had been scanned on at least four separate occasions, with none of the resulting image files linked to a common metadata tag or record number.

Why the Timing Is Uncomfortable

The Aam Aadmi Party government under Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal had set a public deadline of June 30, 2026 to digitise all property and heritage records for Old Delhi's 1,797 listed structures. That date has now passed. The duplicate-image backlog is a direct reason the project is behind schedule, according to documents reviewed by The Daily Delhi. Roughly 38,000 image files held on MCD servers at its ITO headquarters are flagged as potential duplicates awaiting manual verification before they can be merged, deleted or reassigned.

The delay matters beyond bureaucratic inconvenience. Heritage researchers at the Delhi School of Architecture and residents applying for property-mutation certificates in areas like Chandni Chowk and Daryaganj depend on accurate digital records. When scanned images are duplicated without consistent file naming, a property that should return one result in a public database instead returns four or five — sometimes with conflicting dimensions or survey dates attached. Lawyers handling property disputes in Tis Hazari courts have reportedly begun attaching printed MCD database screenshots to filings, only to be told by registry clerks that the image versions do not match the master record.

What Technicians Are Doing About It

The MCD's Information Technology Department, headquartered at Civic Centre on Minto Road, is now running a de-duplication protocol using open-source image-hashing software. The approach compares pixel-level fingerprints of every TIFF and JPEG file in the archive and flags pairs that exceed a similarity threshold of 95 percent. That process began on June 28 and is expected to take six to eight weeks to run across the full archive of approximately 2.1 lakh scanned images.

The Heritage Conservation Committee has also suspended new uploads until the existing library is cleaned. That freeze affects around 14 active documentation projects, including ongoing photographic surveys of havelis in Naya Bans and the mosque clusters near Jama Masjid. Researchers from the School of Planning and Architecture on IP Estate who were contributing images to the shared repository have been asked to hold submissions until at least August 15.

The episode has renewed questions about whether the original procurement of scanning equipment — spread across three separate vendors contracted between February 2024 and September 2025 — allowed for incompatible file-naming conventions that seeded the duplication problem from the start. MCD has not yet published a formal audit of the procurement process.

For residents and researchers who need access in the meantime, the MCD's Zonal Office in Kashmere Gate is still accepting in-person requests for certified paper copies of property records. Digital access to the cleaned archive, officials have indicated, should resume in phases starting in September 2026. Anyone with a pending property-mutation application tied to an Old Delhi address should carry both a physical and digital copy of any supporting map or survey document when visiting revenue offices — because until the de-duplication is complete, clerks cannot guarantee which version of a scanned record is authoritative.