How Delhi's Government Archives Ended Up Flooded With Duplicate Images — And What It Will Take to Fix It

Tens of thousands of duplicate photographs and scanned identity documents sit across at least four separate government servers in Delhi, the result of nearly a decade of overlapping digitisation campaigns run by agencies that rarely spoke to each other. The problem, long acknowledged quietly inside the Delhi Secretariat on I.P. Estate, has now forced a formal review — the first coordinated audit of image records across city departments since 2019.

The timing matters. Delhi is mid-way through an ambitious push to move citizen services entirely online under the e-District portal, a platform that handles everything from domicile certificates to marriage registrations for residents across all eleven revenue districts. Duplicate images — the same Aadhaar-linked photograph uploaded separately to the Delhi Jal Board, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, and the Revenue Department — inflate storage costs, slow retrieval times, and create verification mismatches that can delay approvals for ordinary Delhiites waiting on documents.

How the Duplication Built Up Over Years

The roots go back to 2015-16, when both the then-AAP government at the state level and central government agencies began parallel digitisation drives with separate mandates and separate budgets. The National Informatics Centre, which manages much of the technical backbone for state governments, operated under Union Ministry guidelines. Delhi's own Information Technology Department ran its own procurement contracts. Neither framework required the two to synchronise image databases.

By 2020, the situation was compounded by the Covid-19 vaccination registration rush. The CoWIN platform, administered centrally, ingested profile photographs independently of Delhi's own health department records at the Directorate of Health Services in Kashmere Gate. Welfare scheme enrollments under the Delhi government's Mukhyamantri Mahila Samman Yojana and ration card updates through the Food and Supplies Department at Indraprastha Estate added further layers. Each enrollment cycle asked citizens to re-upload photographs rather than pull from a shared repository, because no shared repository with adequate access controls existed.

A 2023 report by the Comptroller and Auditor General of India — covering central and state government digital infrastructure — flagged redundant data storage as a systemic issue across multiple states, noting that uncoordinated digitisation had resulted in duplicated citizen data assets running to petabytes nationally. Delhi was among the states cited in that audit's broader findings on data governance gaps, though the specific volume of duplicated image files in the capital's systems has not been independently published.

What a Fix Actually Requires

The practical challenge is deduplication — running algorithms that match images across databases and flag or merge redundant records — without compromising the integrity of citizen files or creating new privacy vulnerabilities. The Delhi government's IT Department, operating from offices near the Vikas Bhawan complex in I.P. Estate, has floated a proposal for a Unified Citizen Image Repository, a single credentialed image store linked to Aadhaar numbers that all departments would query rather than independently collect from.

That proposal, discussed in inter-departmental meetings this past spring, faces two familiar obstacles: jurisdiction and money. Several departments regard their citizen data holdings as operational assets and are reluctant to migrate them into a centrally managed state repository they do not control. The Municipal Corporation of Delhi, which merged its three predecessor bodies only in 2022, is still consolidating its own internal records from what were separately administered North, South, and East Delhi databases. Asking the MCD to now participate in a cross-agency image deduplication exercise adds one more migration task to an already strained IT team.

Budget is the second brake. Deduplication at scale — across databases holding records for Delhi's population of roughly 32 million — requires either significant internal compute resources or cloud contracts, both of which need approval cycles that historically run well past a financial year's planning window.

For residents, the practical advice for now is straightforward: when filing any fresh application on the e-District portal or at a Jan Suvidha Kendra service centre, use a single standardised photograph that matches your Aadhaar-registered image. Inconsistencies between uploaded images and Aadhaar records are currently the most common reason applications trigger manual review delays, according to guidance posted on the Delhi government's official services website. The deduplication fix will take months at minimum. The paperwork queue does not wait.