How Delhi's Government Websites Ended Up Flooded With Duplicate Images — And Who's Responsible for Fixing It

Delhi's network of government websites — from the Delhi Development Authority's housing portal to the Municipal Corporation of Delhi's grievance platform — is carrying thousands of duplicate images that are slowing load times, burning storage budgets and frustrating the engineers now tasked with cleaning up the mess. The problem did not appear overnight. It accumulated across nearly a decade of poorly coordinated digital expansion, and the current push to finally address it is the direct result of a National Informatics Centre audit completed in early 2026.

Understanding why this matters requires going back to the period between 2015 and 2020, when multiple Delhi government departments rushed to establish individual web presences without any shared digital infrastructure policy. The Delhi Cabinet Secretariat, the Delhi Jal Board and the Public Works Department each procured separate content management systems, often from different vendors, with no interoperability requirements written into the contracts. Photographs of the same Yamuna riverfront project, the same Chandni Chowk heritage restoration work or the same Delhi Metro Phase 4 construction site were uploaded independently by each department covering the event — sometimes five or six times across different servers.

A Fragmented System Built on Short-Term Thinking

The structural cause is straightforward. When the AAP government digitalised dozens of citizen services after 2015, the priority was speed of deployment, not long-term asset management. The e-District portal, which handles birth certificates, income certificates and dozens of other documents, was built rapidly and integrated with departmental websites that had their own image libraries. Nobody was designated to govern those libraries centrally. By 2022, the Delhi e-Governance Society had identified the duplication problem internally, but a formal remediation programme never received budget approval during that fiscal cycle.

The Connaught Place-based offices of the Delhi e-Governance Society sit at the administrative heart of this problem. The Society was set up to coordinate exactly this kind of cross-departmental digital work, but its mandate has historically been narrower than its name implies — focused on connectivity infrastructure rather than content management. Meanwhile, the NIC's Delhi State Centre, based in the CGO Complex at Lodhi Road, provides backend hosting for many of these portals and has watched storage demands grow at rates its original infrastructure was not designed to accommodate.

The numbers illustrate the scale. A February 2026 internal technical review — the details of which were shared at a meeting of the Delhi Digital Mission steering committee — found that image duplication across twelve major government portals accounted for a storage overhead running into several terabytes. Page load times on some departmental sites had degraded to more than eight seconds on standard mobile connections, well above the three-second threshold that the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology's Web Guidelines, first published in 2009 and last substantially revised in 2018, specify as the acceptable maximum for public-facing government services.

What the Remediation Programme Actually Looks Like

The current effort, which began formally in April 2026, involves three parallel workstreams. First, a deduplication script developed by the NIC Delhi team is being run across hosted content to identify exact and near-exact image matches. Second, a new centralised Digital Asset Management system is being piloted by the Delhi e-Governance Society, with the PWD and Delhi Jal Board portals serving as the first test cases. Third, updated procurement guidelines are being drafted that would require any new departmental website contract to include mandatory compliance with a unified asset library.

For residents who use services tied to these portals — whether checking Yamuna water quality data on the Delhi Jal Board site or tracking a DDA housing allotment in Rohini or Dwarka — the practical benefit should eventually be faster, more reliable pages. That improvement is still months away. The deduplication sweep is expected to conclude by October 2026, with the new asset management system going live in a limited capacity before the end of the financial year. Whether the procurement guidelines clear the tendering process on the same schedule is a separate question, and one that depends on coordination between the Cabinet Secretariat and the Finance Department that has historically moved slowly.

For now, Delhi's digital infrastructure carries the weight of its own unplanned history — one department, one redundant image upload, at a time.