How Delhi's Government Websites Ended Up Flooded With Duplicate Images — And Why It's Finally Being Fixed

Delhi's Department of Information Technology has begun a formal audit of duplicate images embedded across more than 40 government web portals, a long-overdue cleanup that exposes just how chaotic the capital's rush to go digital actually was. The audit, which began in the first week of July 2026, targets everything from the Delhi Jal Board's grievance portal to the Delhi Development Authority's housing scheme pages, where the same project photographs have been uploaded, renamed, and re-uploaded dozens of times over several years.

The problem did not happen overnight. It accumulated across three distinct phases of Delhi's digitisation push — the early e-governance experiments under the Sheila Dikshit administration in the late 2000s, the Aam Aadmi Party's aggressive public-service app launches after 2015, and the pandemic-era scramble to move citizen services online between 2020 and 2022. Each phase brought new vendors, new content management systems, and new teams with no obligation to coordinate with whoever came before them.

How the Mess Was Made

The structural problem was straightforward: Delhi's government departments never shared a centralised digital asset management system. The Delhi Secretariat at ITO, the Indraprastha Gas Limited offices in Connaught Place, and ward-level municipal offices across East Delhi were all running independent web infrastructure procured under separate tenders. When a department wanted to illustrate a new scheme — say, a Yamuna riverfront beautification update or a Delhi Metro Phase 4 corridor announcement — a junior staffer would upload whatever image was at hand, usually a JPEG already sitting on a shared drive, with no check against what had already been published.

By 2023, the Delhi e-District portal alone had accumulated an estimated storage overhead running into several terabytes of redundant media, according to a procurement document reviewed by a right-to-information applicant and later reported by a Delhi-based digital rights group. The images were not merely duplicates of each other — many were low-resolution scans of printed photographs that had themselves been digitised from earlier scans, degrading quality at every step while multiplying file counts.

The AAP government's flagship doorstep delivery scheme, launched in 2018, added another layer. Promotional imagery for the service was distributed to 70 mobile sahayak centres across the city, with each centre uploading its own version of standard graphics to locally maintained microsites. Nobody deleted the originals from the central server. The result: the same smiling family photographed outside a ration shop in Shahdara appeared, in slightly different crops and compression settings, on at least 11 separate government URLs as recently as late 2025.

Why the Audit Is Happening Now

Two pressures converged to force action. First, the Delhi government's cloud hosting bill, paid to the National Informatics Centre's state data centre in Delhi, had grown to a point where the IT department flagged it internally during the 2025-26 budget review. Second, the impending Phase 4 Delhi Metro expansion — with new stations scheduled to open along the Janakpuri West to Krishna Park Extension corridor — required a rebuilt public information infrastructure capable of handling high-traffic map and schedule imagery without the sluggishness that plagued earlier Metro phase launches.

The current audit is using automated deduplication tools deployed by a vendor empanelled under the MeitY Digital India framework. The tools scan file hashes rather than filenames, meaning a photograph renamed six times still registers as a single original. Early results, shared internally in late June, reportedly identified thousands of redundant image files across the portals screened so far, though officials have not released a final figure publicly.

For ordinary Delhiites, the practical consequence has been pages that load slowly on 4G connections in high-density neighbourhoods like Laxmi Nagar and Karol Bagh, where government portal use tends to spike whenever a new ration card or property tax deadline falls due. Removing duplicate assets is expected to cut average page-load times measurably on lower-bandwidth connections.

The IT department has set an internal deadline of September 30, 2026, to complete deduplication across the priority portals, ahead of the winter session of the Delhi Assembly. Departments that fail to migrate to the new shared asset library by that date will, according to the procurement document, have their legacy CMS hosting costs charged back to their own budgets rather than absorbed centrally — a financial incentive that officials are betting will accelerate compliance faster than any circular has managed before.