'Our Memories Are Being Erased': Delhi Residents Speak Out Against Duplicate Image Replacement in Heritage Digitisation Drive

At least three community archive centres in Old Delhi are reporting the same problem: photographs submitted by residents for digitisation have been returned — or re-uploaded to shared portals — as duplicate, lower-resolution replacements, with the originals either misplaced or overwritten. The complaints span households in Chandni Chowk, Ballimaran and the lanes around Jama Masjid, and they are growing louder.

The issue cuts to something immediate. Delhi's urban renewal projects, including Phase 4 of the Delhi Metro expansion and the Central Vista redevelopment corridor, have accelerated documentation drives in affected neighbourhoods. Residents were encouraged to submit family photographs and neighbourhood images to community digital archives as part of heritage conservation outreach. Several now say what came back to them, or what was posted on shared platforms, was not what they handed over.

What Residents Are Saying

The complaints cluster around a single practical grievance: a family submits an original print — sometimes the only surviving photograph of a demolished haveli in Gali Qasim Jan or a street view of Khari Baoli from the 1960s — and what gets digitised and returned is a compressed copy made from a copy. The tonal detail is gone. In some cases, the original print was not returned at all.

One family from Ballimaran, whose grandfather ran a medicine dispensary near the Hakim Ajmal Khan Road junction, described submitting five photographs from the 1950s. When they checked the Dilli Heritage Portal — a repository administered under the aegis of the Delhi Urban Art Commission — three of the five images appeared as pixelated thumbnails clearly generated from a secondary scan. Requests to recover the originals, they say, have not been resolved in over four months.

The Intach Delhi Chapter, which has been involved in conservation documentation across the walled city since the 1990s, operates a parallel archive at its office on Lodhi Road. Community members say they have started approaching Intach directly rather than trusting the official digitisation workflow, precisely because provenance tracking at that organisation is seen as more rigorous.

A resident of the Matia Mahal area near Jama Masjid put it plainly: these photographs are not decorative. They are evidence. When a lane gets widened or a building gets demolished for a Metro station shaft, the photograph is the only record that the structure existed at all. A blurry replacement is no record at all.

The Technical and Administrative Gap

Digitisation experts point to a systemic flaw. When batch scanning operations are outsourced to vendors without strict metadata protocols, duplicate image replacement — where a scan of a scan is filed under the original asset ID — becomes common. The problem is not unique to Delhi. But Delhi's scale makes it acute. The walled city alone contains an estimated 4,000 listed and unlisted heritage structures, according to figures cited in a 2021 Archaeological Survey of India review of the Shahjahanabad precinct.

The practical consequence is that when communities try to contest demolition orders or apply for heritage listing under the Delhi Heritage Conservation Committee's review process, the photographic evidence they need to submit may itself be compromised. Several residents said they were not informed before submission that their prints might be handled by a third-party scanning vendor rather than directly by a government archivist.

The Dilli Heritage Portal was launched in early 2024 as a joint initiative. At the time, it was described in government communications as a repository that would allow residents to contribute to a living archive of the city's visual memory. That promise is now what many in Chandni Chowk and Ballimaran say they are holding officials to.

Community members say they want three things: a published audit of all assets currently flagged as duplicates in the portal's back-end system, a clear returns protocol with a named contact officer at the Delhi Urban Art Commission, and a commitment that no original submitted photograph will be destroyed or permanently overwritten. Whether the administration responds before the next phase of Metro construction documentation begins — currently scheduled to intensify in the Chandni Chowk corridor by late 2026 — will determine how much of the old city's visual record survives.