How Delhi's Government Archives Ended Up Flooded With Duplicate Images — And What It's Costing the City

Delhi's e-governance infrastructure is carrying a problem nobody publicly owns: tens of thousands of duplicate image files clogging the servers that underpin everything from ration card applications to property tax records. The Delhi e-District portal, managed under the Department of Information Technology, has been quietly accumulating redundant scans, passport-size photographs, and document images since at least 2019, when the state government began digitising citizen services in earnest ahead of the 2020 assembly elections.

The duplication problem matters now because Phase 4 of the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation expansion — with new stations planned at Inderlok, Lajpat Nagar, and Janakpuri West — is driving a fresh wave of land-record uploads, property verifications, and rehabilitation paperwork. Every redundant image sitting on a government server slows query times and inflates storage costs that ultimately come out of the municipal budget. Officials at the Delhi Secretariat in IP Estate have confirmed that a deduplication audit is underway, though no completion date has been announced publicly.

How the Duplication Built Up

The roots of the problem run back to 2017. The Aam Aadmi Party government launched the Doorstep Delivery of Services scheme, which eventually covered over 100 citizen services and required field agents equipped with handheld scanners to upload documents on the spot. Those uploads went into multiple backend systems simultaneously — the e-District portal, the Delhi Jal Board's own customer database, and the MCD's property records system — with no deduplication layer sitting between them.

By 2021, when the National Informatics Centre flagged inconsistencies in the state's cloud storage usage during a routine audit, the e-District portal alone had reportedly ballooned to several times its projected storage footprint. Separate upload pipelines for the Pradhan Mantri Awas Yojana applications, handled jointly by Delhi's Urban Development Department and the central Housing Ministry, added another layer of redundancy. The same resident's Aadhaar scan, income certificate, and photograph could exist in three or four separate folders, each created by a different contractor with a different naming convention.

Connaught Place's centralised NIC data centre and a secondary facility in Dwarka Sector 10 both carry copies of these files. Neither facility's procurement team had a mandate, at the time, to check what the other was storing.

What a Fix Actually Requires

Deduplication at this scale is not a weekend project. Perceptual hashing — the standard technique for identifying visually identical images even when file names differ — requires processing power, staff trained to validate algorithmic outputs, and a legal sign-off process before any file is deleted from a government archive. Delhi's IT Department awarded a systems integration contract in March 2026 to address storage rationalisation across six departments, with a reported value in the range of several crore rupees, though the exact figure has not been disclosed in any public tender document reviewed by this reporter.

Civil society organisations monitoring Delhi's Right to Information compliance, including the Satark Nagrik Sangathan based in Nizamuddin East, have pointed out that storage bloat has secondary consequences: slower portal response times mean longer queues at Common Service Centres in areas like Mustafabad and Sangam Vihar, where residents without home internet access depend on government kiosks to file applications.

For now, residents dealing with documents for Metro-related land acquisition along the Janakpuri–RK Ashram corridor, or filing under the Yamuna floodplain rehabilitation schemes tied to the ongoing river cleanup politics, should expect the e-District portal to run slower than normal during peak hours. The IT Department has advised applicants to upload documents before 10 a.m. or after 7 p.m. to avoid server congestion — a workaround that underlines just how far the underlying infrastructure still has to travel before the deduplication work is complete.