Dhaka's Duplicate Image Problem: How the City Stacks Up Against Mumbai, Nairobi and Jakarta

Dhaka has a duplicate image problem. Tens of thousands of property records held by the Dhaka City Corporation and the Department of Land Records and Surveys carry scanned photographs that appear more than once, linked to multiple different plots, owners, or registration numbers. The practical result: contested ownership claims, stalled transactions, and court dockets in the Motijheel and Gulshan district land offices that local legal practitioners say have grown visibly heavier over the past three years.

The issue matters now because Bangladesh's National Land Management Information System, a government-backed digitisation drive that began formal rollout in 2022, has accelerated the ingestion of legacy paper records into centralised databases. Faster ingestion without adequate deduplication tools means errors that once lived in isolated filing cabinets are now replicated across connected systems simultaneously. The Ministry of Land acknowledged the digitisation push in public budget documents for the 2024–25 fiscal year, allocating roughly Tk 480 crore to land modernisation nationwide — but independent technology reviewers working with NGOs in Dhaka have noted that deduplication protocols were not a named line item in that spending plan.

At ground level, the consequences are visible in two particular hotspots. In Rayer Bazar, a densely settled neighbourhood in Dhaka South, residents attempting to update inheritance records after property transfers have been turned away multiple times when clerks flag duplicate cadastral photographs in the system. In Banasree, a planned residential area in Rampura, a cooperative housing society filed a formal complaint with the Rajdhani Unnayan Kartripakkha — better known as RAJUK — in early 2025, arguing that satellite imagery used to demarcate plot boundaries had been duplicated from an adjacent zone and applied incorrectly to their registered land parcel. The complaint is still pending resolution.

How Dhaka Compares to Mumbai, Nairobi and Jakarta

Other large cities in the developing world have confronted the same crisis, with notably different results. Mumbai's Maharashtra Land Records department completed a dedicated image-deduplication audit of its city survey records between 2021 and 2023, using hash-matching software to identify and flag roughly 1.2 million duplicate entries across the state, according to Maharashtra government press materials published in early 2024. Nairobi's National Land Information Management System, supported partly by UN-Habitat funding, introduced automated duplicate detection as a mandatory gateway check before any new image upload from January 2024. Jakarta's Badan Pertanahan Nasional — the national land agency — ran a pilot deduplication programme across five urban kelurahan in 2023, cutting disputed boundary records by an estimated 34 percent in those zones, figures the agency released in an official annual report.

Dhaka has no equivalent completed audit on record. RAJUK has spoken publicly about broader digital reform, and the Land Ministry's Smart Bangladesh framework references data quality, but no government document reviewed for this article sets a concrete deduplication deadline or assigns a named agency unit the specific task of purging duplicate property images from the national system. That gap puts Dhaka behind not just Mumbai and Jakarta but also Kathmandu, where the Department of Survey launched a narrower but functional image-verification programme for the Bagmati Province in 2025.

What Residents and Planners Should Watch For

For anyone dealing with property transactions in Dhaka right now, the practical advice from legal aid organisations including the Ain o Salish Kendra is to request a fresh certified copy of cadastral images directly from the relevant sub-registry office — not to rely on digital printouts from intermediaries, which may reflect uncorrected duplicate entries. The Dhaka sub-registries at Demra and Dhanmondi have both been cited by civil society groups as offices where manual cross-checking remains the most reliable fallback.

On the policy front, the Land Ministry is expected to table a revised Digital Land Service Act for parliamentary review before the end of 2026. Whether that legislation will include mandatory deduplication standards — with enforcement teeth — will be the clearest signal yet of whether Dhaka is serious about closing the gap with cities that have moved faster on this unglamorous but consequential piece of urban infrastructure.