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

Delhi's public-sector digital infrastructure is carrying an estimated 30 to 40 percent redundancy load in image files stored across civic databases, according to internal IT assessments reviewed by The Daily Delhi. The problem spans everything from the Delhi Development Authority's property records portal to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi's digitised building-plan archives — and the financial cost is no longer trivial.

The issue has sharpened in urgency because Delhi is mid-way through a multi-department digitisation drive timed to align with the Delhi Metro Phase 4 corridor rollout, which requires thousands of geo-tagged construction-site photographs logged weekly into central servers. When the same image is uploaded two, three, or sometimes five times across different departments that lack deduplication protocols, storage costs compound fast.

What the Data Actually Shows

A baseline figure gives the problem its scale. The MCD alone manages document repositories that, as of the last public audit cycle in March 2026, collectively occupied more than 18 terabytes of active storage. Independent storage engineers working on Smart City projects in Delhi estimate that industry-standard deduplication tools typically recover between 25 and 55 percent of consumed space in public-sector image libraries of that size — a range that, even at its lower end, represents several terabytes of recoverable capacity and the annual licensing or hardware cost that goes with it.

The Delhi Secretariat's e-Governance unit, housed near ITO, runs the centralised DARPG-linked document management system that feeds multiple AAP-government flagship portals including the Doorstep Delivery Scheme's backend. Sources familiar with the system — who work in the city's IT procurement sector and spoke in a professional capacity — say duplicate profile photographs and scanned ID images submitted by applicants are the single largest category of redundant data. A resident who applies for a ration card correction, a caste certificate, and a domicile certificate can trigger the same photograph being stored as three separate unlinked files.

At Pragati Maidan, the India Trade Promotion Organisation's revamped exhibition complex has faced a parallel version of this problem inside its event-management vendor ecosystem. Event photographers contracted for the complex routinely deliver RAW and JPEG versions of the same shot to multiple client departments. Without a shared digital asset management layer, separate wings of the same organisation end up paying for storage of functionally identical files. Digital asset consultants who have worked with government-linked entities in Connaught Place and the central business district put the average per-terabyte annual cost of managed cloud storage for public-sector clients in Delhi at roughly ₹4,200 to ₹6,500 — making the redundancy problem a line item that adds up to lakhs annually at any mid-size department.

Why Deduplication Keeps Getting Deferred

The technical fix is not complicated. Hash-based deduplication — where software generates a unique fingerprint for every image file and suppresses storage of any file whose fingerprint already exists in the system — is standard in enterprise environments. Products widely used in Indian government IT deployments can process a 10-terabyte library in under 48 hours. The National Informatics Centre, which maintains infrastructure for central and state portals, has published advisories recommending deduplication as part of its data-centre optimisation guidelines.

The barrier is procurement inertia and, more specifically, the absence of a Delhi-specific mandate requiring departments to audit image repositories before they expand storage contracts. The AAP government's Digital Delhi initiative, launched in its current form in 2023, set targets around service delivery speed and portal uptime but did not include a storage-efficiency benchmark. That gap is where duplicate images accumulate unseen.

What happens next depends on whether the e-Governance directorate incorporates a deduplication requirement into the next round of Annual Maintenance Contracts for departmental servers, renewals for which cluster around October and November each year. IT departments that want to get ahead of the problem without waiting for a mandate can run open-source tools such as dupeGuru against locally accessible image directories as a first diagnostic pass — free to deploy, and capable of generating a percentage-redundancy report within hours. For a city spending heavily on digital infrastructure while fighting annual air-quality crises that demand real-time data integrity, cleaning up the image layer is one of the cheaper wins available.