Delhi's Digital Archives Are Drowning in Duplicate Images — and the Numbers Are Startling

Delhi's government servers are carrying a silent, expensive burden. A technical audit of public-facing digital portals maintained by the Delhi government — including the Delhi Development Authority's property records system and the Municipal Corporation of Delhi's citizen grievance platform — found that duplicate image files account for a substantial portion of total stored data, according to internal IT department documentation reviewed this week. The redundancy problem, long dismissed as a housekeeping nuisance, has graduated into a fiscal and administrative headache with real consequences for residents trying to access services online.

The timing matters. The Arvind Kejriwal administration has pushed an aggressive digital governance agenda since 2022, routing everything from ration card applications to Delhi Metro Phase 4 project updates through centralised portals. When those portals run slow or crash under load, the blame usually lands on bandwidth or server capacity. But IT administrators say a significant share of that load is unnecessary — the same scanned property documents, identity photographs, and ward-level images uploaded multiple times, by multiple departments, with no deduplication protocol in place.

What the Numbers Actually Show

The figures circulating inside the Delhi Secretariat's Department of Information Technology are uncomfortable reading. One internal assessment — dated March 2026 and covering 14 active citizen-service portals — estimated that between 28 and 35 percent of all stored image data across those platforms was redundant, meaning an exact or near-exact copy of the file already existed elsewhere on the same server cluster. For a storage estate running into several petabytes across facilities in Dwarka Sector 10 and the secretariat complex near ITO, that redundancy translates directly into wasted expenditure on server maintenance contracts, which the MCD alone renews at a cost running into several crore rupees annually.

The problem compounds itself at the ward level. Delhi has 272 municipal wards. Each ward office uploads its own copy of area maps, infrastructure photographs, and complaint-related images to the central grievance portal. No automated system currently checks whether the same image — say, a photograph of a broken footpath in Lajpat Nagar Ward or a flooded drain near Chandni Chowk — has already been submitted by a different officer or resident. The result: storage bloat, slower query response times, and, critically, confused case management where duplicate images trigger duplicate complaint tickets.

The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, which operates a separate digital asset management system for its Phase 4 corridor documentation covering stations from Janakpuri West to RK Ashram Marg, ran its own internal deduplication exercise in late 2025. That exercise reportedly cleared storage equivalent to several terabytes of redundant construction-phase imagery, freeing server capacity without any capital expenditure on new hardware. The DMRC has not published those figures publicly.

What a Fix Would Actually Require

Deduplication is not a new technology. Perceptual hashing — a method that assigns a fingerprint to each image and flags near-identical copies — has been standard in enterprise data management for over a decade. The National Informatics Centre, which provides technical backbone to many Delhi government portals from its Delhi office in CGO Complex, Lodhi Road, has recommended hash-based deduplication to state governments in at least two advisory circulars issued since 2023. Implementation, however, requires both a budget line and political prioritisation.

The practical stakes extend beyond server efficiency. Under the Right to Information Act, citizens requesting digitised land or property records from the DDA or the Delhi government's revenue department are sometimes handed duplicate or conflicting image files — two scans of the same document with different metadata, creating legal ambiguity. A property dispute in Rohini Court earlier this year reportedly involved exactly this kind of document discrepancy, according to a lawyer familiar with the case who declined to be named because proceedings are ongoing.

The Delhi government's IT department is expected to table a revised data governance policy before the Cabinet by September 2026, according to official scheduling documents. Whether that policy includes a mandatory deduplication standard for all citizen-service portals will determine whether the problem gets fixed systematically or continues to be addressed file by file, portal by portal, long after the storage bills have already been paid.