How Dhaka's Digital Records Ended Up Full of the Same Image Used Twice: The Story Behind the Duplicate Problem

Dhaka City Corporation's ward-level digital mapping database contains thousands of property photographs taken over the past decade — and a significant portion of them appear more than once, attached to different records. That is the core finding that has quietly pushed Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC) and the Urban Development Directorate under the Ministry of Housing and Public Works to begin a coordinated duplicate-image replacement drive across their shared civic GIS platforms in mid-2026.

The problem did not happen overnight. It is the product of at least three separate digitisation campaigns, each funded through different donor channels, each using different software vendors, and none of them properly reconciled with what came before. Understanding how Dhaka arrived here requires going back to the early 2010s, when the city first began systematic efforts to photograph and geotag properties for tax and planning purposes.

Three Campaigns, No Common Standard

The first major push came under the Urban Governance and Infrastructure Improvement Project, a World Bank-supported initiative that ran from roughly 2012 onwards and targeted markets, commercial plots and major roads including Mirpur Road and Progati Sarani. Field teams used basic digital cameras and uploaded images to a centralised server maintained at the DNCC's Gulshan-based administrative office. The metadata was inconsistent from the start — file-naming conventions changed between field teams, and no mandatory unique identifier was attached to each photograph at the point of capture.

A second digitisation wave followed around 2017 under a Japanese International Cooperation Agency-supported project focused on drainage infrastructure in low-lying wards in Demra and Jatrabari. That project used a different image management system entirely. When its data was later migrated into the city's main property registry, automated scripts duplicated thousands of images because the import tool could not distinguish between a photograph already logged under a street address and the same photograph imported again under a plot number referencing the same location.

The third campaign, run between 2021 and 2023 under Dhaka South City Corporation's (DSCC) Resilient City programme with partial Asian Development Bank funding, introduced mobile-app-based field photography in areas including Lalbagh, Hazaribagh and parts of Old Dhaka near the Buriganga riverfront. That app compressed images differently than legacy files, creating apparent mismatches that caused the reconciliation software to treat original and duplicate as two separate assets rather than flagging one for removal.

Why the Fix Is Harder Than It Sounds

Replacing or removing duplicate images from a live civic database is not a simple delete-and-replace operation. Each image in the system is linked to at least one record — a tax file, a building permit application, an environmental assessment, or a land-use classification document. Deleting a duplicate without first unlinking it from every associated record risks orphaning those records, which can stall permit processing or create disputes during property transfers at the Land Registration Office on Segunbagicha Road.

The DNCC has engaged a local technology firm based in Tejgaon to run a hash-based deduplication scan across an estimated 1.4 million image files in its primary database. The contract, according to procurement notices posted on the DNCC website in May 2026, covers a 90-day audit and replacement cycle ending in late September 2026. The DSCC is understood to be running a parallel internal review, though no separate vendor contract has been publicly announced.

Urban data specialists familiar with similar exercises in cities such as Karachi and Jakarta have noted that deduplication projects of this scale routinely surface secondary problems — mislabelled images, images attached to demolished structures, and photographs of genuinely different properties that hash-matching algorithms incorrectly flag as duplicates because of lighting or camera-angle similarities.

For Dhaka residents, the practical stakes are immediate. Property owners in areas such as Mohakhali and Badda who have pending building permit applications or land mutation cases at city offices should check with the relevant ward office whether their file includes a flagged duplicate image, as affected records may face short processing delays through August and September while the audit runs. The DNCC's helpline at its Nagar Bhaban headquarters in Fulbaria has been designated as the first point of contact for queries related to the review.