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

Delhi's municipal and cultural institutions are sitting on a sprawling, partially catalogued mess of duplicate digital images — and the tools to fix that problem are arriving slowly, unevenly, and well behind cities that faced the same crisis a decade ago. The Archaeological Survey of India, whose headquarters sit on Janpath near Connaught Place, acknowledged internally last year that its digitised archive contains tens of thousands of redundant image files, many of them mislabelled or duplicated across multiple storage systems during successive scanning drives between 2018 and 2024.

The issue matters now because Delhi is mid-way through several high-stakes digital documentation projects. The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation's Phase 4 corridor expansion — tunnelling through historically sensitive neighbourhoods including Janakpuri West and Lajpat Nagar — requires continuous photographic records for environmental compliance and heritage impact assessments. When those records contain duplicate or replaced images, the evidentiary chain for future disputes is compromised before it even begins.

What Delhi's Institutions Are Actually Doing

The Delhi Urban Heritage Foundation, which operates out of offices near Kasturba Gandhi Marg, has been running a de-duplication programme since early 2025 on its archive of Old Delhi streetscapes — images covering areas including Chandni Chowk, Ballimaran and the lanes around Jama Masjid. The foundation uses perceptual hashing, a technique that compares image fingerprints rather than file names, to identify near-identical photographs taken from slightly different angles or at different times. The process flagged roughly 34 percent of the foundation's total image library as duplicates or near-duplicates in its first audit pass, according to the foundation's published 2025 annual report.

The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts, located in the central government cultural complex off Dr. Rajendra Prasad Road, has taken a different approach — contracting an external vendor to run batch de-duplication across its photographic holdings before migrating them to a new cloud system. That migration was scheduled for completion by March 2026 and is running approximately four months behind schedule, a delay the centre has attributed publicly to procurement timelines under the government's GeM portal rules.

Contrast this with Seoul, where the National Museum of Korea completed a full de-duplication and reattribution of its digital image holdings — roughly 2.1 million files — by 2022, using AI-assisted metadata reconstruction developed in partnership with KAIST, the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. London's Victoria and Albert Museum completed a comparable exercise between 2020 and 2023 across its 1.2 million digitised objects, and now publishes its de-duplication methodology as open-source documentation. Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya has made more progress than Delhi on this front, completing a structured image audit in 2024 that covered its colonial-era photographic collection, though its contemporary acquisitions archive remains unaudited.

The Deeper Risk: Misattribution in a Political City

Delhi's particular vulnerability is political. Images of sites like the Yamuna riverfront — a perpetual battleground between the AAP-led Delhi government and the BJP-controlled central civic bodies — circulate constantly in policy documents, court filings and media reports. Duplicate or replaced images in official submissions have already been flagged in at least two National Green Tribunal proceedings related to Yamuna flood-plain encroachments, where opposing parties submitted photographs of the same stretch of river taken years apart as if they were contemporaneous evidence.

The National Informatics Centre, which maintains digital infrastructure for multiple Delhi government departments from its Lodhi Road campus, has been piloting a blockchain-based image timestamping tool since October 2025. The pilot covers document images submitted through the Delhi government's e-District portal. A full rollout across heritage and environmental documentation systems has not yet been announced or funded.

For institutions and legal teams operating in Delhi right now, the practical takeaway is straightforward: any image submitted as evidence in heritage, environmental or infrastructure proceedings should carry a verifiable hash and timestamp, not just a file date. The courts are increasingly alert to this gap, and the cost of establishing chain of custody after the fact is substantially higher than doing it at the point of capture. Seoul learned that lesson in 2019. Delhi is still learning it in 2026.