How Delhi's Government Archives Ended Up Flooded With Duplicate Images — And Why It's Finally a Crisis

Delhi's public record system has a clutter problem that nobody wanted to admit. Across at least four separate digitisation projects run between 2019 and 2024 — spanning the Municipal Corporation of Delhi, the Delhi government's Revenue Department, the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, and the Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Board — the same physical documents, site photographs, and heritage survey images were scanned multiple times by different agencies using incompatible formats, then stored on separate servers with no cross-referencing protocol in place.

The result: an estimated backlog of duplicate digital image files numbering in the tens of thousands, consuming server space across data centres in Shastri Bhawan and the MCD's Civic Centre on Minto Road. The problem has surfaced now because the Delhi government's IT Department is attempting to consolidate those repositories ahead of the planned rollout of a unified citizen-services portal — a project that was promised in the 2025-26 Delhi budget and cannot move forward until the duplicate content is resolved and a coherent file taxonomy is established.

How the Duplication Happened

The roots trace back to the push that followed the Smart Cities Mission, launched by the central government in 2015. Delhi — specifically the New Delhi Municipal Council area — received funding in successive tranches to digitise property records, heritage photographs, and planning maps. But the Smart Cities Mission funds were administered centrally through the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs, while state-level digitisation work continued independently through bodies like the Delhi Archives on Shamnath Marg in Civil Lines and the Revenue Department's district offices in places like Dwarka and Rohini.

Nobody built a shared database. Each agency scanned what it needed, in the format it preferred — some using TIFF at 600 dpi, others JPEG at much lower resolution — and stored the output locally. When the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation separately commissioned a photographic survey of construction corridors along Phase 3 and Phase 4 alignments, dozens of images of landmarks like the Qutub Minar, Humayun's Tomb, and the Chandni Chowk streetscape were captured again, overlapping with image sets already held by the Archaeological Survey of India's northern regional office on Janpath.

By 2023, the MCD merger — which brought the three formerly separate municipal corporations under one roof — made the problem acute. The unified MCD inherited servers from the old North, South, and East Delhi Municipal Corporations, each carrying its own image archive. IT staff who joined the merged entity found files duplicated not just across agencies but within individual legacy servers, because older scanning workflows lacked automatic duplicate-detection at the point of upload.

The Cost and the Cleanup

Storage is not cheap at government scale. Delhi's IT Department, in planning documents circulated ahead of the 2025-26 budget session, flagged that unoptimised data storage was contributing to infrastructure costs that had grown by roughly 30 percent over three years. The unified citizen-services portal — modelled in part on DigiLocker integration and intended to bring land records, building permits, and civic grievances under one login — requires a clean, deduplicated image library before it can be reliably indexed and searched.

The Delhi Archives on Shamnath Marg has been designated the nodal agency for the deduplication exercise. A technical committee drawing on staff from the National Informatics Centre — which manages the NIC Data Centre on Lodhi Road — is expected to begin systematic file hashing and comparison runs this quarter. File hashing allows technicians to identify identical files regardless of their names or folder locations, a standard method used in similar exercises by municipal governments in cities like Tokyo and London.

The practical advice for Delhi residents who submit photographs with online applications — for property mutation, building plan approval, or the PM Awas Yojana housing scheme — is to use the prescribed file format specified on each portal form. Inconsistent uploads from citizens have added a secondary layer of duplication on top of the institutional problem. Residents in colonies from Vasant Kunj to Laxmi Nagar who have pending digital applications should check their submission status through the MCD's eMCD portal before the new unified system goes live, expected by the end of the third quarter of the 2026-27 financial year. Resubmission may be required if legacy records cannot be matched to new file standards during the transition.