How Dhaka's Digital Records Fell Into Chaos: The Story Behind the Duplicate Image Crisis

Dhaka City Corporation's digitisation push, launched in earnest around 2019 under a World Bank-backed urban governance programme, was supposed to modernise how the capital managed everything from land records to ward-level population data. Instead, auditors working through the National Institute of Local Government flagged a persistent and embarrassing problem: thousands of property and citizen files contained duplicate images — scanned documents uploaded multiple times under different reference numbers, sometimes linked to entirely the wrong address or household.

The problem matters now because Dhaka South City Corporation and Dhaka North City Corporation are both mid-way through a unified digital land registry initiative that draws directly on those compromised archives. If the underlying image files are not cleaned up before the two databases merge, officials risk encoding the errors permanently into a system that ward commissioners across the capital's 75 wards will rely on for tax assessments, eviction orders, and infrastructure planning.

How the Duplicates Accumulated

The roots of the problem go back further than 2019. In the early 2010s, several non-governmental organisations — including urban data NGOs operating out of Agargaon and Mirpur — ran parallel scanning drives under separate donor contracts, using different file-naming conventions and without a shared central server. The Bangladesh Computer Council provided some technical guidance but had no enforcement mandate over municipal partners. Files were burned onto DVDs, handed to ward offices in Demra and Jatrabari, and uploaded piecemeal whenever connectivity allowed. Duplicates crept in at every handoff.

A 2022 internal assessment by the Local Government Division — never publicly released but described in broad terms during a parliamentary standing committee session — reportedly identified more than 40,000 suspect image files across the two city corporations. The figure has not been independently verified, and both corporations have declined to confirm or deny it. What is not disputed is that the Bangladesh Urban Resilience Project, funded to the tune of roughly $173 million and active since 2015, had digital record integrity listed as a deliverable that remained incomplete when the project's original timeline closed.

The Motijheel commercial zone presented one of the sharpest illustrations of the mess. Property files for several blocks along Dilkusha Commercial Area were scanned twice — once by a city corporation team and once by a Revenue Board contractor — producing near-identical image sets filed under different case numbers. Tax collectors working those blocks in 2023 and 2024 reported spending significant time reconciling which record was authoritative before issuing notices.

What Needs to Happen Before the Merge

The Bangladesh Computer Council, working with a Dhaka-based technology firm contracted earlier this year, has been running a deduplication algorithm across the combined archive since March 2026. The process uses image-hash matching to flag probable duplicates for human review. Ward-level data officers — positions created under the Urban Partnerships for Municipal Development programme — are then responsible for verifying and resolving each flagged pair.

The practical advice for anyone who has submitted documents to either city corporation in the past five years is straightforward: keep your originals. Residents in Pallabi, Badda, and other rapidly growing northern wards who submitted land-use applications between 2020 and 2023 are especially likely to have files that passed through multiple scanning rounds. If a ward office contacts you about a discrepancy, bringing the original stamped document will resolve the matter far faster than trying to trace the digital chain.

The unified registry is currently scheduled to go live in the first quarter of 2027. Whether the deduplication work finishes on time depends on how quickly ward officers can clear the review queue — which, as of late June, reportedly still contained tens of thousands of unresolved flags. The corporations have not published a progress figure. The pressure is real: Dhaka's population, now somewhere above 22 million by most estimates, generates new records daily, and the backlog grows even as the cleanup teams work through the old one.