How Delhi's Government Archives Ended Up Flooded With Duplicate Images — And What It's Going To Cost to Fix It

Delhi's Directorate of Information and Publicity is sitting on a problem it spent years creating. Across multiple hard drives, cloud partitions, and legacy servers housed at the Indira Gandhi State Archives on Purana Qila Road, the same photographs — of inaugurations, rallies, Metro station openings, and Yamuna cleanup ceremonies — exist in hundreds of duplicate copies, eating storage, slowing retrieval systems, and, according to internal administrative filings reviewed by The Daily Delhi, costing the Delhi government an estimated ₹1.4 crore annually in unnecessary cloud storage fees.

The problem matters now because Phase 4 of the Delhi Metro expansion, with new corridor documentation being generated daily across stations from Janakpuri West to R.K. Ashram Marg, is adding thousands of fresh images per month to systems that are already buckling. The upcoming merger of several state digitisation platforms, mandated under the central government's Digital India Land Records Modernisation Programme, means Delhi's archival chaos will soon be visible — and auditable — at the national level.

How the Duplication Began

The roots go back to 2015, when then-newly elected Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's AAP government launched an aggressive public communications push, contracting at least three separate vendors to document government schemes including the Mohalla Clinic rollout across neighbourhoods like Trilokpuri and Sangam Vihar. Each vendor submitted image batches independently. The Directorate of Information and Publicity, operating out of its office on Rajpur Road in Civil Lines, had no centralised deduplication protocol at the time. Batches were accepted, logged under different reference numbers, and stored.

Between 2017 and 2022, at least four separate digitisation drives — each announced with its own budget line under successive Delhi government budget cycles — added new storage infrastructure without retiring the old. The Delhi Archives' 2019 annual report noted that the organisation was managing content across seven distinct storage environments. No single administrator held cross-system access. Duplicate image rates in some event-specific folders ran as high as 340 percent, meaning the same image existed in more than three full copies across different directories.

The BJP-led central government's push for states to integrate with the National Data and Analytics Platform, which accelerated through 2024, exposed the scale of the problem. Delhi's data submissions repeatedly failed automated validation checks, flagging duplicate file hashes. By early 2025, the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology had formally written to the Delhi government's IT department requesting a remediation plan within 90 days.

The Bill and the Fix

The Delhi government contracted Noida-based firm CMS IT Services in March 2025 to conduct a full image audit across the Directorate of Information and Publicity's holdings. The audit, covering roughly 2.3 million image files, identified around 890,000 flagged as probable or confirmed duplicates. CMS IT Services submitted its preliminary report in November 2025; the remediation phase, involving automated hash-matching software and manual review panels working out of the Delhi Secretariat at ITO, began in February 2026.

The process is not cheap. The remediation contract is valued at ₹3.8 crore, spread across 18 months. Officials working on the project have described the manual review component as particularly labour-intensive: images from politically sensitive events — including Yamuna cleanup inaugurations where multiple versions exist with different cropping or colour correction applied — require human sign-off before deletion. The Yamuna Action Plan documentation alone runs to more than 60,000 image files from events held between 2020 and 2025 at ghats stretching from Wazirabad to Okhla.

The practical upshot for Delhi residents is largely invisible — no public service will visibly improve on July 5 because of archival housekeeping. But the longer arc matters. Integrated civic platforms like the Delhi One portal, which residents in areas like Dwarka and Rohini use to access government scheme information, draw on the same backend content infrastructure. Faster, cleaner image databases mean faster page loads and fewer broken links on those services. The remediation team expects to clear the backlog by August 2027, ahead of a proposed unified digital archive launch tied to Delhi's statehood debate timeline. Whether that deadline holds is a question the Secretariat's IT wing will be answering in the months ahead.