How Delhi's Government Portals Became Riddled With Duplicate Images — and Why Fixing It Took Years

Delhi's official government websites have been quietly carrying thousands of duplicate, broken, and misattributed images for years — a problem that plagued everything from the Delhi Development Authority's housing portal to the Delhi Tourism Corporation's public-facing pages. Efforts to systematically audit and replace those images are now underway, but the mess took the better part of a decade to accumulate.

The issue matters now because the Delhi government is mid-way through a flagship digital services push. Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal's administration has been expanding e-governance under the Delhi Dialogue and Development Commission, aiming to move more than 300 public services online by the end of 2026. Broken or duplicated image assets don't just look sloppy — they slow page load times, trigger accessibility violations, and in some cases have displayed incorrect or misleading visuals alongside official health and civic advisories. For a city where roughly 53 percent of internet access happens on mobile devices with limited data, according to TRAI's 2025 annual report, every extra kilobyte carried by redundant image files has a real cost to users.

How the Problem Built Up

The roots go back to around 2016 and 2017, when multiple Delhi government departments began migrating from older static HTML sites to content management systems, primarily WordPress and Drupal installations managed by the National Informatics Centre's Delhi State Unit, based in the CGO Complex on Lodhi Road. During those migrations, image libraries were imported in bulk, without deduplication protocols. A photograph of Connaught Place, for instance, might exist in four different folders under three different filenames across two separate portals — each copy pulling server bandwidth independently.

The Delhi Secretariat's own web cell, which sits inside the main secretariat building off IP Estate, flagged the problem in an internal review as early as 2019, but budget allocation for a full content audit never cleared. NIC estimates shared with departmental IT heads — figures that have circulated in inter-departmental correspondence but have not been made public — reportedly put the number of redundant image files across Delhi government domains in the tens of thousands. Without a central digital asset management system, each department operated its own upload folder. The result was entirely predictable.

The Yamuna cleanup campaign pages offer a specific, well-documented illustration. Between 2020 and 2023, the Delhi Jal Board's public communications portal ran at least three visually distinct versions of its campaign microsite, each rebuilt from scratch by a different vendor. Each rebuild imported fresh image sets without clearing the old ones. By 2024, the combined image directory for Jal Board's web properties had grown to over 18 gigabytes, a figure cited in a Right to Information response filed by a Delhi-based digital rights researcher in March 2025.

The Push to Clean It Up

A coordinated remediation effort began in earnest in early 2026, driven partly by the Phase 4 Metro expansion communications requirement. The Delhi Metro Rail Corporation, which operates independently of the state government but coordinates on public information, required joint landing pages for new stations including those along the Janakpuri West–RK Ashram Marg corridor. NIC's Delhi unit used that requirement as leverage to push for a unified image repository standard across participating agencies.

The practical consequence for ordinary Delhiites is gradual. Government portal pages that previously took eight to twelve seconds to load on a standard 4G connection in areas like Lajpat Nagar or Rohini are being benchmarked for sub-four-second load times once the duplicate assets are purged. Accessibility auditors working under the guidelines of the National Policy on Universal Electronic Accessibility are also requiring that replacement images carry proper alt-text, a standard that the old duplicated files almost universally failed to meet.

The audit is scheduled to cover 47 Delhi government domains by September 2026. Departments that miss the NIC compliance deadline face having their sites flagged on the central government's Website Quality Certification dashboard — a reputational penalty that has proven effective in nudging departmental IT heads elsewhere. For now, the work is unglamorous and largely invisible, but for anyone trying to load a public service form in the middle of a Delhi summer, it is long overdue.