How Delhi's Public Hoardings Became a Graveyard of Repeated Images — and Who's Finally Being Asked to Fix It

Walk down the Outer Ring Road between Dhaula Kuan and Munirka any morning and you'll count the same government scheme poster appearing at least six times within a single kilometre. The image — a composite photograph used to promote the Delhi Jal Board's Yamuna cleanup drive — is not six different photographs. It is the same file, printed repeatedly, plastered by different contractors who pulled from the same unmanaged municipal image library. This is the problem of duplicate image replacement, and Delhi's civic bodies are now, belatedly, being pushed to treat it as a serious governance failure.

The issue matters right now because the Delhi Development Authority and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi are both mid-way through a digitisation drive that was supposed to consolidate the capital's sprawling outdoor advertising infrastructure. Phase 4 of the Delhi Metro expansion, with new stations coming up along the Janakpuri West–RK Ashram corridor, has triggered a parallel surge in co-branded hoardings from both the AAP-led city government and central government agencies. When two bureaucracies draw from poorly catalogued shared repositories, duplication is not an accident — it is an inevitability.

A Problem Built Over Decades

The roots go back to at least 2011, when the MCD split its advertising licensing function across three newly created zones — North, South, and East Delhi Municipal Corporations — before they were re-merged into a single body in May 2022. During those eleven years of fragmentation, each corporation built its own image archive for scheme promotions, event banners, and public health campaigns. None of the three archives was ever formally reconciled. When the unified MCD inherited all three digital folders, it inherited roughly 40,000 image files, many of them duplicates or near-duplicates of each other, according to a Right to Information filing by a South Delhi civic group last year.

The Delhi government's own Dialogue and Development Commission, based in ITO, flagged the duplication problem in an internal working paper circulated among departments in early 2025. The paper noted that at least 30 percent of images used in outdoor public communication across the city between 2022 and 2024 were reprints or digital duplicates of assets already in use elsewhere in the same campaign cycle. The commission did not publish the paper publicly, but its contents were described in a report by the Centre for Communication Governance at National Law University Delhi.

Chandni Chowk is perhaps the most visible case study. The heritage street, which sits at the intersection of Old Delhi's preservation politics and the AAP government's redevelopment ambitions, has carried competing hoardings — some from the Tourism Department, some from the MCD, some from private vendors operating under lapsed licences — that frequently recycle the same stock images of the Red Fort and Fatehpuri Mosque. A survey conducted by students from the School of Planning and Architecture in Kashmere Gate in March 2026 documented 74 distinct hoarding sites along a 1.2-kilometre stretch of Chandni Chowk; 41 of those sites carried images that appeared at least twice elsewhere on the same street.

What Replacing Duplicates Actually Requires

The technical fix is not complicated. Cities like Seoul and São Paulo have implemented centralised digital asset management systems that flag duplicate image uploads before they reach the print stage. For Delhi, the MCD's IT cell has been in talks since January 2026 with the National Informatics Centre, which already manages backend infrastructure for several Union government portals, about adapting an existing deduplication module. The estimated cost of licensing and customisation is in the range of Rs 2.4 crore, a figure that has sat uncleared in the MCD's pending approvals file since February.

The practical path forward requires three things to happen in sequence: the MCD and the Delhi government's Information and Publicity Department must agree on a shared digital repository, the NIC module must be commissioned and tested before the next major campaign cycle, and licensing rules must be tightened so that private hoarding contractors are legally required to clear image assets against the central database before printing. A working group with representatives from both bodies was scheduled to meet at the MCD headquarters in Kashmere Gate in June 2026; that meeting was postponed. A new date has not been announced.