A video of a packed railway station has gone viral on social media with the claim that it shows a crowd boarding a train in Kolkata, seemingly ignoring social distancing norms, after the suburban services resumed in the city on 11 November.
However, we found that the video was shot in 2018 at West Bengal’s Ranaghat railway station much before the coronavirus pandemic started and social distancing norms were put in place.
CLAIM
One of the captions along with the viral video reads: “Scene at Sealdah, Kolkata station - Today 1st local train after it was opened. Corona special?? (sic)”
The same video was also shared with other captions such as: “कोरोना की ऐसी की तैसी|” [Translation: To hell with corona.]
We found that the video is also being circulated on WhatsApp.
WHAT WE FOUND OUT
We extracted the keyframes using the InVID WeVerify Google Chome Extension and conducted a reverse image search. While going through the results, we found some posts from September 2018.
We found a post that had the same video and was published on 23 September 2018. It was captioned: “Ranaghat station Today 8.30am....krishnanagar Bongaon local.”
Two local residents confirmed to The Quint that the station seen in the viral video is Ranaghat.
We also found the same video uploaded on 23 September 2018, geo-tagged on Google Maps as Ranaghat railway Station.
Evidently, an old video from 2018 was shared with a false claim that it showed a huge number of people getting on a train in Kolkata during the coronavirus pandemic.
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