How Delhi's Public Record Archives Ended Up Flooded With Duplicate Images — And What's Being Done to Fix It

Delhi's municipal and heritage digitisation programs are sitting on a problem years in the making: tens of thousands of duplicate image files clogging government servers, duplicated across at least three separate archival initiatives that were never designed to talk to each other. The issue has come to a head in mid-2026 as the Delhi government pushes to consolidate its digital infrastructure ahead of a broader e-governance overhaul scheduled for the fourth quarter of this year.

The roots of the problem go back to roughly 2018, when the Smart Cities Mission — a central government initiative operating under the Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs — pushed urban local bodies across India to digitise physical records at speed. Delhi's implementation was divided between the North, South, and East Delhi Municipal Corporations, each running parallel digitisation drives with separate vendors and no shared metadata standards. When the three corporations were merged back into a single Municipal Corporation of Delhi in May 2022, the legacy databases came with them, duplications intact.

Three Agencies, Three Databases, One Mess

The problem compounds because the MCD effort ran alongside two other simultaneous programs. The Delhi Urban Heritage Foundation, which operates under the aegis of the Delhi government and has offices near Kashmere Gate in Old Delhi, was separately photographing and logging protected monuments in Mehrauli, Nizamuddin, and the Walled City. The Archaeological Survey of India's Delhi circle, headquartered near Janpath, was doing much the same for centrally protected structures — including sites like Humayun's Tomb and Qutb Minar — with its own image cataloguing software. Where jurisdictions overlapped, so did the photographs. The same crumbling haveli in Shahjahanabad might exist as a JPEG in all three systems under three different file names, tagged with three different geolocation entries, none of them cross-referenced.

Storage is not an abstract concern here. Government cloud contracts for Delhi's e-district portal infrastructure were renegotiated in early 2025, and officials within the MCD's IT wing have privately flagged that redundant image files account for a disproportionate share of storage overhead — though the corporation has not released a precise figure publicly. Independent estimates from the civic technology sector, drawing on audits of comparable Indian municipal digitisation projects, suggest duplicate file rates of between 30 and 45 percent are common where inter-agency coordination was absent at the outset.

The Yamuna riverfront documentation project adds another layer. Since 2023, the Delhi Jal Board and the National Mission for Clean Ganga have both been photographically documenting drain outfalls, ghats, and encroachments along the river's stretch through the capital — from Palla in the north to Okhla Barrage in the south. Field teams from both bodies have photographed the same outfall points at Nizamuddin Ghat and the ITO barrage area multiple times, with images filed separately to Union and state government servers respectively.

What a Fix Actually Requires

Correcting this is not simply a matter of running a deduplication script. The images themselves often carry legally significant metadata — timestamps, GPS coordinates, officer sign-offs — that was embedded at the point of capture. Deleting one copy without establishing which version carries the authoritative record risks creating gaps in evidentiary chains, particularly for heritage listings and encroachment cases that may end up before the Delhi High Court on Sher Shah Road.

The Delhi government's Department of Information Technology circulated a draft data-governance framework in March 2026 that proposes a unified image repository for all civic agencies, with a mandatory deduplication check at the point of upload. The framework, if adopted, would require agencies to migrate existing archives into a common metadata schema by March 2027. The MCD, Delhi Jal Board, and the Delhi Urban Heritage Foundation are all named as participating bodies in the draft.

Until that framework is formalised and funded, agencies are advised to freeze new parallel digitisation contracts and conduct internal audits mapping which vendor delivered which image batch and under which government scheme. For citizens trying to access records — property photographs for mutation cases, heritage status documents for renovation permits in Lodi Colony or Chandni Chowk — the practical advice is straightforward: file RTI requests with all three potentially relevant agencies simultaneously rather than assuming any one body holds the complete record.