Delhi Government Wastes Crores as Duplicate Photos Corrupt Lakhs of Files

Delhi's municipal and civic technology infrastructure is sitting on an estimated 4.2 crore duplicate image files across government servers, according to an internal audit completed last month by the Delhi e-Governance Society, a body operating under the state IT department on Rajpur Road. The redundant files, scanned documents, citizen ID photographs, property records, are consuming roughly 18 petabytes of unnecessarily occupied storage at a recurring annual cost of ₹23 crore in server maintenance and cloud licensing fees.

The timing matters. The AAP-led Delhi government has been pushing hard to digitise civic services ahead of the next assembly session, and the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation is simultaneously building out its Phase 4 data integration layer, which links commuter accounts, CCTV archives, and station-level surveillance imagery. Bloated, uncleaned databases slow that integration to a crawl. Officials privately acknowledge the problem has been growing since the pandemic-era rush to scan paper records between 2020 and 2022, when verification standards were loosened.

Where the Duplication Is Worst

The North Delhi Municipal Corporation's property tax portal, which covers households from Civil Lines to Rohini Sector 22, holds the single largest cluster of duplicate images: over 11 lakh redundant photograph files attached to property ownership documents filed between April 2021 and March 2023. Many are identical scans submitted multiple times by the same applicant, a known workaround for a portal bug that failed to confirm successful uploads. The Delhi Jal Board's connection request system, based in Vaishali Nagar, has a separate cache of roughly 6 lakh repeated utility ID images. Together, these two repositories account for nearly 40 percent of the total duplication problem identified in the audit.

The Delhi e-Governance Society study also found that image deduplication software, tools that identify and purge exact or near-exact copies, has been procured but not deployed. Three separate software licenses, collectively purchased for ₹1.8 crore under a 2023 contract, have been sitting unused on procurement records at the IT department's server room in Patel Nagar. The licenses cover a 500-terabyte deduplication scope each, which is more than sufficient to clear the backlog, according to the audit's technical annexure.

The Human Cost in Slow Portals and Rejected Applications

Slower databases translate directly into citizen frustration. Average load times on the MCD property portal hit 14 seconds per page in January 2026, compared to a benchmark target of under 3 seconds set in the Delhi Digital Infrastructure Policy, 2022. At the eSeva Kendra centres scattered across areas like Dwarka Sector 10 and Lajpat Nagar, staff report that application processing times for water and property services have stretched to 22 working days on average, nearly double the mandated ceiling of 12 days under the Right of Citizens to Time Bound Delivery of Services Act. Duplicate image data is not the only cause, but the audit attributes roughly 30 percent of the server lag directly to redundant file retrieval.

For ordinary Delhiites, particularly small property owners in Old Delhi's Chandni Chowk lanes who lack the technical literacy to resubmit applications efficiently, a 22-day wait for a straightforward water connection or property tax correction is a practical hardship with money attached. Each day of delay on a property mutation, for instance, can complicate loan approvals and title clearances.

The Delhi e-Governance Society has recommended a phased deployment of the already-purchased deduplication tools starting in August 2026, beginning with the MCD property database. If the rollout follows the proposed schedule, the North Delhi Municipal Corporation portal should see load times drop below 5 seconds by November. Citizens who have pending applications on the MCD or Delhi Jal Board portals would do well to recheck submission status after the first deduplication batch runs, some applications flagged as duplicates may need resubmission with fresh, uniquely timestamped image uploads. Details are expected on the Delhi government's e-district portal at edistrict.delhigovt.nic.in.