Old Video Shared as ‘Train Supplying Essentials’ Amid Lockdown
A viral video of a train carrying trucks claims to show how essential goods are being supplied around India.
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CLAIM
A video of a moving train carrying trucks is going viral as proof of how essential goods are being supplied around India amid the countrywide lockdown over the outbreak of coronavirus.
The video is being shared with the following message: “This is how all essential materials reaching throughout country, while state borders are sealed.
Modi hai toh mumkin hai 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻”
A large number of trucks can be seen on the train.
The same video was also shared on Twitter with a similar claim, claiming that Indian Railways was helping maintain the supply chain across the country.
The Quint received the video from a reader asking about its veracity.
TRUE OR FALSE?
The claim with the video is fake. The video is actually old and has nothing to do with the current lockdown and the supply of essential services in the wake of coronavirus outbreak.
WHAT WE FOUND
On fragmenting the video into several keyframes and reverse-searching them, we came across several old videos of the same train, with different claims.
The oldest that we could find was from November 2009. According to the description of the video, it had been taken at a level crossing at Betalbatim in Goa and showed the train carrying lorries.
On searching some more, we found that the same video had been uploaded in December 2013, this time with the claim that it showed trucks being carried on a train in Kerala.
We also noticed that one of the comments said that it showed the Konkan Railway.
The Quint could not independently confirm the veracity of these videos, but we were able to establish that these videos existed much before the outbreak of coronavirus.
With regard to what is happening in the video, we found that the Indian Railways has a service called Roll On- Roll Off (RO-RO), which, according to this 2013 report is “a piggy back ride given to road trucks on railway wagons”.
The report also says that this service is plying on the Konkan Railway at “economic considerations”. The Konkan Railway was the first to start this service. A photo attached in the report also shows the similarity between the video and the service mentioned.
We found another article published by Mumbai Times in September 2018 which said that the RO-RO service had started on the Central and Western Railways as well.
Therefore, it appears that the video is of the Indian Railways’ RO-RO service. There is no link with the countrywide lockdown at all and the claim with which the video is being shared is fake.
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