How Delhi's Government Archives Ended Up With Thousands of Duplicate Images — And Why It's Finally Being Fixed

The Delhi Secretariat's records management unit has begun a formal audit of its digital image repositories, targeting a backlog of duplicate files that has accumulated across at least seven departments since the city government's e-governance push began in earnest around 2019. The cleanup operation, which involves both the Directorate of Information and Publicity and the Delhi State Archives on Tilak Marg, is the first coordinated effort to address a problem administrators have acknowledged internally for several years.

The timing matters because Delhi is mid-way through a broader digital overhaul tied to Phase 4 of the Delhi Metro expansion, which requires coordinated visual documentation — construction photographs, environmental impact images, public consultation records — stored centrally and accessible to multiple agencies simultaneously. Duplicate files clog those shared repositories, slow retrieval times, and have caused at least three recorded instances where outdated photographs were used in official press materials instead of current ones, according to administrative records reviewed by The Daily Delhi.

How the Duplication Accumulated

The root of the problem runs back to 2017 and 2018, when individual departments within the Delhi government began independently digitising their physical photograph collections without a unified naming convention or a central metadata standard. The Delhi Jal Board, the Public Works Department, and the Urban Development Secretariat each procured separate scanning contracts. None of those contracts required cross-departmental deduplication checks.

By 2021, when the Aam Aadmi Party government launched the Delhi Digital Mission under the Department of Information Technology — headquartered in the Delhi Secretariat complex near ITO — the inherited problem was already embedded in the system. Migration of older scanned files into the new cloud-linked storage framework simply carried the duplicates forward. Estimates from the State Archives suggest the duplicate image count runs into tens of thousands of files, though a precise figure will only emerge once the current audit concludes.

The issue is not unique to Delhi. Mumbai's Municipal Corporation faced a comparable deduplication crisis in its property records photograph database in 2023. But Delhi's problem is compounded by the sheer volume of politically sensitive documentation — Yamuna River cleanup project photographs, air quality monitoring site images, and Old Delhi heritage survey pictures from neighbourhoods like Chandni Chowk and Shahjahanabad — that multiple agencies claim custodianship over simultaneously.

What Replacement and Cleanup Actually Involves

Duplicate image replacement, as an administrative process, is more technically demanding than simply deleting extra copies. Each image file may be linked to a specific public information request, a Right to Information response, or a court submission. Deleting a file without first checking those linkages can break document trails. The Delhi State Archives on Tilak Marg brought in a specialist team in April 2026 to map those linkages before any deletion takes place — a methodical process that is expected to run through the end of September 2026.

The Directorate of Information and Publicity, which handles photographs used in government press releases and campaigns across platforms including the Delhi government's official portal and its Doordarshan Delhi broadcasts, is separately running a parallel image audit. That directorate manages an estimated active library of over 80,000 photographs, though again the audit is expected to revise that number once duplicates are removed and files are properly tagged by location, date, and subject.

Storage costs are a secondary but real consideration. Government cloud storage rates under the National Informatics Centre's MeghRaj platform are not publicly itemised per department, but administrators familiar with the contracts have described the duplication problem as contributing meaningfully to unnecessary expenditure that could otherwise fund digitisation of physical records still sitting in paper form at the Secretariat's basement storage rooms.

For citizens and journalists filing Right to Information requests that touch on photographic evidence — a growing category given disputes over Yamuna cleanup progress and Old Delhi demolition records — the practical effect of the cleanup should be faster response times and more reliable image sourcing from the government's end. Departments have been instructed to hold off on processing new bulk photograph uploads until the September audit deadline passes, meaning the next two months represent a consolidation window. After that, a unified metadata protocol, developed with input from the National Informatics Centre's Delhi office near CGO Complex, is scheduled to govern all future image uploads across participating departments.