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

Delhi's public record offices are sitting on an estimated backlog of duplicate digital images running into the millions — photographs, scanned documents and satellite frames stored redundantly across at least a dozen municipal and state agencies — and the city's centralised data clean-up push is now nearly two years behind the schedule set when the Delhi government announced its Digital Governance Initiative in early 2024. The problem is not unique to Delhi, but the scale here, amplified by the city's sprawling bureaucracy and competing jurisdictions between the Aam Aadmi Party-led state government and central government bodies, makes it an unusually complex case study.

The reason this matters now is straightforward: storage costs money, and redundant image files compound every time a new system is onboarded. India's National Informatics Centre, which manages backend infrastructure for several Delhi government portals, flagged in its 2025 annual technical review that duplicate asset management was consuming a disproportionate share of cloud storage budgets across state-level deployments. Globally, city governments that have let the problem fester typically face a reckoning when they try to migrate legacy systems — a process Delhi's Metro Phase 4 construction data teams are already beginning for the 65-kilometre corridor expansion currently under construction.

Where Delhi Is Falling Short — and Why

The Delhi Secretariat on IP Estate and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi's property mapping unit in Civic Centre, Minto Road, are among the agencies most cited in internal audit notes as having overlapping image repositories. Neither agency has a dedicated deduplication budget line in the 2025-26 fiscal year, according to documents tabled in the Delhi Assembly in March 2026. The MCD's geographic information system, which was unified after the three-corporation merger in May 2022, still carries parallel image sets from the old North, South and East Delhi databases — a structural inheritance problem that IT contractors have been trying to resolve since late 2023.

Compare that with Mumbai, where the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation rolled out an automated deduplication layer on its CMMS platform in January 2025, cutting image storage overhead by roughly 34 percent within six months, according to a presentation the BMC made at a smart-cities conference in Pune in April 2026. London's Government Digital Service set a different kind of benchmark earlier: its 2021 cross-borough image asset audit, covering all 33 boroughs, found 2.3 million redundant files and cleared them within 18 months using open-source perceptual hashing tools. Seoul's Smart City data centre, operating out of the Mapo Digital Media City complex, has run continuous automated deduplication since 2019 and now benchmarks less than two percent image redundancy across municipal databases.

What a Fix Would Actually Require in Delhi

The technical solution is not especially complicated. Perceptual hashing — software that generates a fingerprint for each image and flags near-identical copies — is available at low cost and has been deployed by the Delhi Traffic Police's CCTV analytics vendor since 2023 for a much narrower use case on the Ring Road camera network. The harder problem is governance: deciding which agency holds the canonical version of a duplicated file, and who pays for the migration, when the file sits across departments that report to different ministers or, in some cases, to the Lieutenant Governor's office rather than the elected government.

Heritage documentation adds another layer. The Archaeological Survey of India's Delhi Circle, which manages sites from Humayun's Tomb in Nizamuddin to Purana Qila near Mathura Road, maintains its own photographic archive independently of state systems. Integrating or at minimum deduplicating against those records has not been formally proposed in any current inter-agency working group, as far as publicly available minutes show.

Practically speaking, agencies and vendors working with Delhi government data should assume the deduplication push will pick up pace in the second half of 2026, ahead of the state government's deadline to comply with India's Digital Personal Data Protection Act provisions that came into force in February 2026 — provisions that require demonstrable data minimisation. Organisations supplying image-heavy documentation to MCD or Delhi Development Authority portals should audit their own submissions now, before an automated sweep flags and quarantines files mid-process, causing delays in approvals that can run anywhere from property mutation certificates to building plan sanctions.