Delhi's Digital Archives Are Drowning in Duplicate Images — The Numbers Tell a Damning Story

Delhi's government databases collectively store an estimated 40 to 60 percent of their image content as duplicates, according to internal audits circulated among IT departments of the Municipal Corporation of Delhi and the Delhi government's e-District portal in the first quarter of 2026. That single figure — roughly half of all stored images being redundant copies — is costing the city measurable money at a time when digital infrastructure budgets are already stretched thin by Metro Phase 4 rollout demands and the Yamuna cleanup monitoring program.

The problem has sharpened this year for a specific reason. Three major civic digitisation drives launched simultaneously between late 2024 and early 2026 — the MCD's property record digitalisation push, the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board's slum mapping initiative, and the Delhi Jal Board's pipeline documentation project — each built their own image repositories with no shared deduplication standard. Field surveyors routinely uploaded the same site photograph to multiple portals, and no automated system caught the overlap.

What the Storage Bills Actually Show

Cloud storage costs are not abstract. Delhi government departments currently pay an average of approximately ₹3.8 per gigabyte per month on managed cloud contracts — a figure drawn from procurement documents tabled before the Delhi Legislative Assembly's Public Accounts Committee in March 2026. A single high-resolution survey image from the Yamuna floodplain corridor project, covering the stretch between Wazirabad Barrage and Okhla Barrage, runs to roughly 8 to 12 megabytes. Multiply that across the Delhi Jal Board's documented image bank of over 2.1 million files — a number cited in the DJB's own annual report for 2025-26 — and the redundant copies alone occupy an estimated 4 to 6 terabytes of paid-for space.

The e-District portal at the Delhi Secretariat in ITO has logged similar inefficiencies. Citizens applying for caste certificates, domicile certificates and income certificates are required to upload scanned documents, and the portal lacks a hash-based duplicate detection layer. IT staff at the secretariat, speaking in general terms to The Daily Delhi without attribution to individual names, confirmed that the document image backlog has grown by roughly 30 percent year-on-year since 2023, with no corresponding increase in the data cleaning budget. The National Informatics Centre, which manages the portal's backend, has been in discussion with Delhi's IT department since at least January 2026 about integrating deduplication tools, but no contract has been signed.

Where Delhi Compares — and Falls Behind

Mumbai's Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation deployed a perceptual hashing system across its property tax image database in 2023, reducing storage overhead by 34 percent within the first six months, according to a case study published by the Centre for Digital Financial Inclusion in New Delhi. Delhi's MCD, which manages roughly 1.4 million taxable properties compared to Mumbai's 1.1 million, has no equivalent programme active as of July 2026. The Kejriwal administration announced a broader e-Governance modernisation push under the Delhi Digital Mission framework in February 2025, but image deduplication was not listed among the seven priority workstreams in the publicly available mission document.

For the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, the stakes are partly operational. Phase 4 construction documentation — covering corridors including the Janakpuri West to Krishna Park Extension line and the Aerocity to Tughlaqabad stretch — generates thousands of daily site photographs. DMRC stores these through a project management information system, but engineers on multiple sites have noted, in informal briefings with this reporter, that the absence of automated duplicate checks means search and retrieval times are slower than they should be, complicating quality audits.

The practical fix is not expensive. Deduplication software licences for a database of Delhi's scale typically run between ₹15 lakh and ₹40 lakh as a one-time implementation cost, with annual maintenance at roughly 20 percent of that figure. The Delhi government's IT department has a discretionary modernisation fund of ₹120 crore for the 2026-27 fiscal year, according to budget documents passed in March. The data problem, in other words, is already identified, the solution is costed, and the money exists. Whether the procurement machinery moves before next year's monsoon survey season — which will add another wave of field photographs — is the only open question that matters.