Delhi's Duplicate Image Problem: How the Capital Stacks Up Against Mumbai, London and Seoul

Delhi's network of government websites, public grievance portals and civic databases is carrying thousands of duplicate and outdated images — redundant photographs clogging servers, slowing citizen-facing services and making official records unreliable. The Delhi government's IT department acknowledged the backlog earlier this year, flagging it as part of a wider digital housekeeping push tied to the Smart Cities Mission compliance review scheduled for the third quarter of 2026.

The issue sounds technical. Its consequences are not. When a resident in Rohini files a complaint about a broken footpath on the Delhi Municipal Corporation's online portal, duplicate images attached to older, resolved tickets often resurface in active queues — misleading field officers and inflating unresolved complaint counts. The same problem has been documented at the Delhi Development Authority's property listing database, where multiple copies of the same block photographs from Dwarka's Sector 12 and Sector 18 have shown up under different file IDs, complicating title verification for hundreds of pending allotments.

A City-Wide Problem With Uneven Fixes

The Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board, which manages resettlement colony records across dozens of bastis from Bawana in the northwest to Madanpur Khadar in the southeast, has been attempting a phased deduplication since January 2026. The board is working with a perceptual hashing protocol — a method that identifies visually identical or near-identical images by comparing pixel pattern signatures rather than file names alone. The approach is the same technology that Mumbai's Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation began deploying in late 2024 for its building plan archive, which reportedly contained over 40,000 duplicate attachments by the time the cleanup began.

London's equivalent exercise, run through the Greater London Authority's open data platform between 2022 and 2024, cost roughly £1.2 million and cleared approximately 380,000 redundant image files across 14 boroughs. Seoul's Smart City Operations Centre completed a comparable audit of its public infrastructure photo logs in 2023, reducing storage overhead by 28 percent across city-owned servers. Delhi, by comparison, is working with a more fragmented infrastructure — more than a dozen agencies maintain separate image repositories with no unified deduplication standard, making cross-portal cleanup harder to coordinate and track.

The National Informatics Centre, which provides the technical backbone for most central and state government portals operating out of Delhi, has been encouraging agencies to adopt the government's own DigiLocker-linked image validation framework since 2024. Uptake among Delhi's municipal bodies has been slow. The New Delhi Municipal Council, which covers the Lutyens zone including Connaught Place and the government quarter around Rajpath — now Kartavya Path — completed its image audit in March 2026. The three other municipal entities covering the rest of the city have not yet published timelines for completion.

Why the Delays Matter Beyond Storage Costs

The practical stakes extend well beyond server bills. Delhi Metro Phase 4 construction, which is advancing along corridors including the Janakpuri West to RK Ashram Marg stretch, generates continuous site documentation — thousands of photographs logged weekly by contractors and inspection teams. Duplicate entries in those logs have previously caused discrepancies between physical progress reports and digital records, according to procurement documents reviewed during a 2025 Parliamentary Standing Committee examination of infrastructure project monitoring. Unresolved image duplication makes audit trails weaker and disputes over milestone payments harder to resolve cleanly.

Mumbai has moved furthest among Indian cities in addressing this, having linked its deduplication system directly to its GIS mapping layer, so that any image uploaded to a civic record is automatically cross-checked against a geo-tagged archive. Bengaluru's Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike began a similar integration in early 2026. Delhi's Smart Cities Mission project office has flagged GIS-linked deduplication as a 2027 priority, but no procurement tender for the work had been issued as of the time of writing.

For residents, the most direct piece of advice from digital governance researchers is straightforward: when submitting image-supported complaints or documents to Delhi civic portals, use uniquely named files with date stamps embedded in the filename itself. This does not fix the backend problem, but it reduces the chance of a submission being flagged as a duplicate of an earlier, unrelated record. The bigger fix — the one that brings Delhi up to the standard already set in Seoul and London — will require the city's agencies to stop operating as separate silos and agree on a shared image registry. That conversation, at least, appears to finally be underway.