Delhi's Heritage Archives Are Riddled With Duplicate Images — Officials and Experts Are Finally Talking

The Archaeological Survey of India's regional office in Janpath confirmed this week that its digital archive of Old Delhi monuments contains at least 14,000 duplicate image files — photographs of the same sites captured multiple times across different survey cycles, mislabelled, and stored redundantly across three separate servers. The admission, buried in an internal review circulated among heritage officials in late June 2026, has reignited a broader argument about the state of Delhi's institutional memory at a moment when the city is tearing up large sections of Shahjahanabad to make room for Metro Phase 4 construction.

The timing matters. With Phase 4 corridors cutting through sensitive zones near Chandni Chowk and the Kashmere Gate precinct, heritage bodies are supposed to maintain comprehensive photographic and documentary records before any ground is broken. Duplicate images create a specific and practical problem: when archivists cannot tell which photograph is the authoritative record of a structure's pre-construction condition, legal disputes over compensation and restoration become harder to resolve. Delhi High Court saw three such disputes in 2025 alone, all involving contested photographic evidence submitted by competing government departments.

What Officials and Experts Are Saying

Officials at the Delhi Urban Heritage Foundation, headquartered near Asaf Ali Road, say the duplication problem stems from a decade of uncoordinated digitisation drives. Three separate government agencies — the ASI, the Delhi Government's Department of Art, Culture and Languages, and the National Archives of India on Janpath — each ran independent scanning programmes between 2014 and 2023 without cross-referencing their outputs. The result is an estimated 40 percent redundancy rate across combined digital holdings, according to figures cited in the June review document.

Heritage conservation specialists connected to the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage, which maintains an office in Lodhi Estate, argue that the real cost is not just storage waste. Duplicate images without proper metadata — no GPS coordinates, no survey date, no photographer ID — are essentially useless for legal or scholarly purposes. INTACH's Delhi chapter flagged this issue in a submission to the Delhi Development Authority as far back as January 2024, recommending mandatory use of a unified tagging protocol before any new digitisation contracts were awarded. That recommendation was not acted upon.

The AAP government, for its part, has pointed to the central government's jurisdiction over the ASI as the reason it cannot unilaterally fix the problem. A senior official in the Directorate of Archaeology under the Delhi government said in a written statement that the department is willing to participate in a joint de-duplication exercise but requires formal cooperation from the Union Ministry of Culture, which controls the Janpath office's budget and data governance policies.

What Comes Next for the Archive

A working group is now being proposed. The Ministry of Culture has reportedly circulated a draft terms-of-reference document to the ASI, INTACH, and the National Archives, calling for a six-month audit concluding by January 2027. The audit would use open-source image-matching software — similar to tools already deployed by the Aga Khan Trust for Culture in its Humayun's Tomb restoration documentation — to automatically flag probable duplicates for human review.

The cost estimate for the audit stands at approximately ₹1.8 crore, a figure that heritage advocates consider modest given that unchecked duplication is already costing the ASI an estimated ₹60 lakh annually in unnecessary cloud storage fees paid to a vendor contracted through a 2021 agreement.

For residents of neighbourhoods like Nizamuddin and Mehrauli, where ASI-managed monuments sit within walking distance of active construction zones, the practical stakes are immediate. If the de-duplication audit proceeds on schedule, the January 2027 deadline would still arrive after Metro Phase 4's most disruptive excavation work near Kashmere Gate — meaning the clean archive many experts are calling for would come too late to serve as the pre-construction baseline it was always supposed to be. Conservation groups say the ministry should authorise an emergency interim protocol by September 2026 at the latest.