Dhaka's Digital Records Drive Hits a Snag: Duplicate Images Clog City Databases

City officials at the Dhaka North City Corporation's e-governance unit confirmed this week that a systematic review of uploaded document images in the citizen service portal has uncovered thousands of duplicate files — the same scanned pages stored multiple times under different application numbers — jamming storage capacity and causing retrieval delays that in some cases stretch to several hours.

The timing matters. Bangladesh's Digital Bangladesh initiative, now transitioning under the Smart Bangladesh 2041 vision, has pushed municipal offices to move paper records online at an accelerating pace since 2023. The National Data Centre in Kaliakoir, about 40 kilometres northwest of Dhaka, provides cloud infrastructure for many of these services. But the speed of scanning drives has outpaced any coherent deduplication policy, leaving civil servants uploading the same trade licence photograph or NID copy three and four times across related applications without any automated check catching the error.

The practical fallout is visible at street level. Residents turning up at the Nagar Bhaban on Fulbaria Road and at the ward service counters in Mohammadpur and Mirpur-10 have reported being told their submitted documents cannot be retrieved promptly, with staff explaining — without offering formal written acknowledgment — that the back-end system requires manual cross-checking before records can be confirmed. For small business owners renewing trade licences ahead of the July 31 deadline, the hold-up carries real financial stakes.

What Went Wrong and Where

The problem is not unique to Dhaka North. The Dhaka South City Corporation's Land Tax Department, headquartered near Gulistan, has faced similar complaints since at least April 2026, when ward-level officers began flagging inconsistencies in the property assessment database. Duplicate image files — particularly scanned holding tax receipts and deed photographs — were creating conflicting records for the same property parcel, with some files appearing as many as six times in the system according to internal review notes circulated among department staff.

Bangladesh's Access to Information (A2I) Programme, which sits under the Cabinet Division and has driven much of the digital service rollout at the union and city level, does not currently mandate a deduplication protocol as part of its citizen service centre technical standards. That absence is now drawing scrutiny. The A2I Programme's digital service blueprint, last updated in late 2024, specifies image resolution and file-size limits for uploaded documents but contains no provision requiring automated hash-checking — the standard technique used to identify and flag identical files before they are stored twice.

Storage costs are not trivial. Government procurement records show that cloud storage contracts for municipal digital services have been valued in the range of several crore taka per annual cycle for major city corporations, though precise figures for the Dhaka corporations' current contracts were not available for independent verification by The Daily Dhaka before publication.

What Applicants Should Do Now

Several steps can reduce the chance of getting caught in the backlog. Anyone submitting civic documents — trade licence renewals, holding tax payments, birth certificate applications — at ward service centres in areas including Dhanmondi, Uttara Sector 7, and Badda should request a printed acknowledgment slip with a unique tracking number at the point of submission. That slip is the only reliable proof of a lodged application if records temporarily disappear from the portal view.

The e-governance unit at Nagar Bhaban has indicated, without specifying a firm date, that a deduplication script will be run across the citizen portal database before the end of July. If it works as planned, applicants whose files were duplicated should see their records consolidate into a single correct entry. Those who do not see an update within two weeks of the script's announced completion are advised to follow up in person at the relevant ward office and bring original documents as backup. Digital convenience, for now, still requires a paper safety net.