Delhi's Duplicate Image Problem: The Key Decisions That Will Shape the City's Digital Archives

Delhi's public institutions are staring down a backlog. Across the Delhi State Archives on Shamnath Marg, the Municipal Corporation of Delhi's digitisation cells, and the Archaeological Survey of India's regional office in Janpath, tens of thousands of duplicate scanned images have accumulated over years of overlapping digitisation drives — and nobody, until recently, had a clear mandate to sort them out.

The problem crystallised this year when the Delhi government's IT department, working under the broader Smart Cities Mission framework, began auditing its centralised document management system. The audit found that duplicate image files were consuming storage space that had been budgeted for new Phase 4 Delhi Metro corridor documentation and the ongoing Yamuna riverfront mapping project. Storage costs in government cloud contracts are not trivial: enterprise-grade archival storage on National Informatics Centre infrastructure runs roughly ₹4,500 to ₹6,000 per terabyte per year depending on redundancy tier, and several departments were found to be storing the same high-resolution scans in three or four separate silos.

Why the Next Six Months Matter

The audit deadline is December 2026. That is when the Delhi government's IT department must submit a rationalisation report to the Union Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology under the National Digital Governance Framework. Miss that window, and departments risk losing access to centrally subsidised NIC storage — forcing either a costly migration to private cloud or a crude deletion exercise that could wipe legitimate records alongside the duplicates.

The stakes are highest for institutions holding irreplaceable material. The Delhi State Archives on Shamnath Marg holds land records dating to the late Mughal period. A 2024 UNESCO assessment of South Asian archival digitisation — the most recent publicly available benchmark — flagged that roughly 30 percent of scanned heritage documents in the region lacked a verified original-duplicate tracking system at the point of ingestion. Delhi's own internal review, circulated to departmental heads in March 2026, reportedly identified over 1.2 lakh image files flagged as probable duplicates across five major repositories, though that figure has not been independently confirmed.

The Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts in Janpath has been running its own parallel deduplication exercise since February, using open-source perceptual hashing tools to compare image fingerprints rather than relying on file names or metadata alone. That approach matters because many of Delhi's legacy scans were ingested with inconsistent naming conventions — the same photograph of a Chandni Chowk haveli might appear as three files with different timestamps, resolutions, and department prefixes, yet all three are legally the same record.

The Decisions That Cannot Be Delayed

Three choices are now in front of Delhi's administrators. First, which deduplication standard will the city adopt? The NIC has recommended a hash-based verification protocol, but several MCD units are still using manual comparison, which is slower and error-prone. Second, who has deletion authority? Under current rules, no single official below joint-secretary level can authorise the permanent removal of a scanned government record — a bottleneck that effectively paralysed a similar exercise in 2021. Third, what happens to the freed storage? Heritage advocates connected to the Old Delhi documentation project centred around Ballimaran and the Ghalib Institute want any recovered capacity ringfenced for the ongoing scan of pre-1947 property maps, which remains only 40 percent complete.

The Aam Aadmi Party government has positioned digital governance as a signature agenda item, but the BJP-controlled MCD and the central government's line ministries control significant portions of the relevant infrastructure. That split jurisdiction means any city-wide deduplication protocol will require sign-off from at least three bodies that do not always move in the same direction.

For institutions, researchers, and the citizens who depend on public land records, the practical advice is straightforward: file Right to Information requests now to determine whether the digital copy of any document you hold is a verified original or a duplicate. The December deadline will force decisions. Whether those decisions are made carefully or in a rush depends almost entirely on whether enough pressure lands on the right desks before the monsoon session of the Delhi Assembly ends in August.