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

Delhi's municipal and transit agencies are sitting on a backlog of thousands of duplicated digital images embedded across public-facing platforms — from the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation's route-map interface to the Delhi Development Authority's online land parcel database — and the work of identifying and replacing them has barely begun. Officials at the DDA's Vikas Sadan headquarters in INA Colony have acknowledged the problem internally, though no public timeline for resolution has been announced.

The issue has come into sharper focus in mid-2026 because Phase 4 of the Delhi Metro expansion — connecting Janakpuri West to RK Ashram Marg, among other corridors — is feeding new station photography, signage scans and route-card graphics into systems that already carry redundant legacy files dating back to Phase 1 commissioning in 2002. When duplicate images persist in wayfinding databases, physical signage at stations and digital displays can fall out of sync, creating confusion for the roughly 6.5 million daily commuters the DMRC reports using the network.

What Mumbai and Seoul Are Doing Differently

Mumbai's infrastructure bodies have taken a more systematic approach. The Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation launched a digital asset audit in January 2025 that specifically targeted image duplication across its 227 ward-level citizen service portals, contracting the work to a Pune-based technology firm under a tender worth approximately ₹4.2 crore. By March 2026, the BMC reported clearing more than 18,000 redundant image files from its public health and property tax platforms. Seoul's city government went further still, integrating an automated hash-checking protocol into its Smart Seoul Data Campus in Mapo-gu in 2023, which flags duplicate uploads before they enter any public-facing system. Delhi has no equivalent gate-check in place.

London's Transport for London directorate dealt with a comparable problem when it overhauled its Journey Planner tool between 2021 and 2023, dedicating a dedicated content operations team to audit roughly 40,000 station and interchange images. The exercise took 22 months. Delhi's digital infrastructure footprint is considerably larger and more fragmented — spread across the DMRC, the DDA, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, and the Delhi government's own e-district portal — which means a similar audit here would require cross-agency coordination that has historically proved difficult.

Ground-Level Impact in Chandni Chowk and Beyond

The practical consequences are visible in Old Delhi. Traders near Chandni Chowk's Fatehpuri Masjid area who use the MCD's online trade licence portal have encountered stale map thumbnails showing pre-redevelopment streetscapes — images that predate the Central Public Works Department's 2021 beautification project on Chandni Chowk's main spine. The mismatch between portal imagery and street reality has caused confusion during address verification for new licences, according to complaints logged on the Delhi government's Samadhan portal, which is a publicly accessible grievance system.

The Aam Aadmi Party government's own flagship e-Governance push, which accelerated after 2020, added significant volumes of scanned documents and photographs to state servers without a concurrent deduplication policy. The National Informatics Centre, which manages back-end infrastructure for Delhi's e-district services from its CGO Complex office in Lodhi Road, sets the technical standards — but enforcement at the departmental level is inconsistent.

The gap between Delhi and peer cities is not purely a question of money or ambition. It is largely a question of governance structure. Where Seoul and Mumbai assigned clear institutional ownership of the deduplication mandate, Delhi's responsibility for digital image hygiene sits ambiguously between the NIC, individual departments, and the DMRC's separate IT cell. Until that ownership question is resolved — ideally before the Phase 4 corridor becomes fully operational, currently expected in late 2026 — the backlog will keep growing. Commuters, traders and citizens applying for services online would do well to cross-check any portal imagery against the DMRC's official app or the MCD's updated GIS viewer, both of which are refreshed more frequently than legacy departmental databases.