Delhi's Duplicate Image Problem: How the Capital Stacks Up Against Mumbai, London and Seoul

Delhi's public digital infrastructure is carrying a quiet, unglamorous burden: thousands of duplicate images clogging government websites, Metro signage databases, heritage documentation portals and civic information systems. The problem surfaced most visibly this year during a Delhi Development Authority audit of its online property listing system, where officials found large volumes of repeated photographic assets inflating storage loads and confusing search results for residents trying to identify plots in areas stretching from Rohini to Dwarka Sector 21.

The timing matters. Delhi is mid-way through a Metro Phase 4 expansion that is generating enormous volumes of new photographic documentation — construction progress images, station design renders, accessibility compliance records — all feeding into centralised databases managed by the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation. Keeping those records clean is not optional bureaucracy; it directly affects how quickly engineers, contractors and safety inspectors can retrieve the right image in the right context.

What Other Cities Are Actually Doing

Mumbai's Municipal Corporation rolled out a perceptual hashing tool across its Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation property portal in early 2025, reducing duplicate image entries by a reported 34 percent within six months of deployment, according to a BMC internal review cited in Maharashtra state assembly budget documents that year. London's Transport for London adopted automated deduplication across its asset management system ahead of the Elizabeth Line opening in 2022, integrating it into a procurement condition for all new digital infrastructure vendors. Seoul's city government embedded duplicate-detection protocols inside its Smart City Data Hub by 2023, making it a baseline standard rather than a retrofit.

Delhi has no comparable mandated standard yet. The Delhi government's Information Technology department has flagged digital asset management reforms in its draft Smart City roadmap, but no formal procurement requirement compelling deduplication software adoption has been gazetted as of July 2026. The contrast with Seoul — which serves a population of roughly 9.7 million compared to Delhi's estimated 33 million — is sharp. Delhi's scale makes the problem harder, but also makes ignoring it more expensive.

In practical terms, duplicate images slow database queries, increase cloud storage costs, and — in heritage documentation work — risk misidentifying monuments. The Archaeological Survey of India's Delhi Circle, which maintains photographic records of protected sites across areas including Mehrauli and the Qutb complex, relies on accurate image cataloguing for restoration work. Duplicates in those archives create version-control headaches that conservators have raised informally at professional forums, though no formal ASI audit finding on this specific issue has been made public.

The Chandni Chowk Factor

Old Delhi presents a specific case study. The Chandni Chowk Redevelopment Project, completed in phases since 2021 under the Delhi government and overseen in coordination with the North Delhi Municipal Corporation, produced large photographic documentation sets — before, during and after construction — that now sit across at least three separate departmental servers with no unified deduplication protocol linking them. Residents and traders who have filed Right to Information requests for site photographs have received duplicated sets in response, a procedural inefficiency that wastes both bureaucratic time and citizen patience.

The fix is neither exotic nor especially costly. Standard perceptual hashing libraries — the same technology underpinning BMC's Mumbai deployment — are available as open-source tools. A phased rollout starting with the DMRC's Phase 4 documentation database, followed by DDA's property portals, would address the highest-volume systems first. Several civic technology organisations operating out of Gurugram and the Delhi NCR region have proposed exactly this kind of integration to government departments, though procurement decisions remain pending.

Delhi's next practical checkpoint is the Delhi government's IT budget review expected in the monsoon session of the Delhi Assembly, likely in August 2026. That session is where digital infrastructure line items — including any provision for asset management tooling — will either appear or be deferred another cycle. Residents who want to follow the issue can track Delhi Vidhan Sabha committee proceedings, which are published on the official assembly website, or monitor DDA tender notices, where any deduplication procurement contract would first appear as a public document.