Delhi's Digital Archives Are Drowning in Duplicate Images — and the Numbers Tell a Damaging Story

Delhi's government servers are storing the same images tens of thousands of times over. Across the Municipal Corporation of Delhi's property tax portal, the Delhi Development Authority's housing application system, and the Unified Mobile Application for New-age Governance platform, duplicate image files have accumulated into a problem that IT administrators describe as systemic — a byproduct of rushed digitisation drives that prioritised upload volume over data hygiene.

The issue has gained new urgency in mid-2026 because three major digital infrastructure projects are converging simultaneously: the Delhi Metro Phase 4 expansion's public consultation portal, the Yamuna Rejuvenation Authority's environmental monitoring dashboard, and the Delhi government's e-district services rollout, which added 47 new citizen services between January and June this year. Each new portal inherited legacy data pipelines that were never designed to detect or purge redundant files.

What the Numbers Actually Look Like

Data audits conducted internally by the Delhi e-Governance Society — the nodal agency operating out of Vikas Bhawan near ITO — have flagged that duplicate image content can account for between 30 and 40 percent of total file storage in poorly managed civic databases globally, according to published benchmarks from the International Data Corporation. Delhi's own Phase 3 Metro portal, audited before it was merged into the current DMRC passenger services system, reportedly carried redundant image loads that slowed average page-load times to over eight seconds — well above the three-second threshold that the National Informatics Centre recommends for public-facing government sites.

The MCD's property GIS mapping system, accessible through the Civic Centre offices on Minto Road, uses scanned document images uploaded by property owners across all 12 zones of the city. Because the portal allows re-submission without deletion of prior attempts, the same ration card photograph or building plan scan can exist in hundreds of nearly identical copies. Storage costs for government cloud infrastructure in India, procured through NIC's MeghRaj platform, run at roughly ₹2.50 to ₹4 per GB per month depending on tier — meaning even a modest 10 terabytes of avoidable duplicate data represents an unnecessary recurring cost in the range of ₹25,000 to ₹40,000 monthly, just for that single agency.

Scale that across the Delhi Jal Board's complaint management system in Varunalaya Phase II, Karol Bagh, the Delhi Transport Corporation's commuter feedback portal, and the dozens of ward-level applications under the Smart Cities Mission node headquartered in Shastri Park, and the aggregate waste grows considerably. No single consolidated audit figure has been made public, but IT procurement records available through RTI applications filed with the Delhi government show cloud storage expenditure across civic agencies increased by approximately 34 percent between 2023 and 2025, even as the volume of net new citizen data grew at a slower rate.

Why Deduplication Has Stalled — and What Comes Next

The technical fix is not complicated. Hash-based deduplication tools — software that assigns each image a unique fingerprint and automatically flags identical copies — are available open-source and have been deployed successfully by the Telangana State Technology Services and by the Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike in its property tax digitisation drive completed in late 2024. The barrier in Delhi is largely procedural: data deletion, even of clearly redundant files, requires sign-off chains that involve the originating department, the Delhi e-Governance Society, and in some cases NIC's Delhi zonal office on Lodhi Road.

The Delhi government's IT department is expected to table a revised Data Quality Management Policy before the end of the current budget cycle, which closes on March 31, 2027. The policy, flagged in the 2026-27 budget speech as part of a broader ₹840 crore digital infrastructure allocation, is supposed to mandate automated deduplication checks at the point of upload for all new citizen-facing portals.

For residents currently using MCD or DDA portals, the practical advice from NIC documentation is straightforward: use the portal's own reference number system to check whether a previous upload was accepted before submitting again. Repeated failed uploads are the single largest driver of image duplication in civic databases — and in Delhi's case, the data suggests that problem runs very deep indeed.