A video of a large number of people boarding a bus in haste amid the coronavirus pandemic, ignoring social distancing rules, is going viral as a scene from Mumbai and Delhi. However, we found that the video is in fact from a place in West Bengal, close to Kolkata.
CLAIM
The video shows a large number of people falling over each other in their efforts to board a bus in haste. While most of them are wearing masks, all notion of social distancing appears to have been forgotten amid the rush to get onto the bus.
Some people shared the video claiming that this had happened as people were boarding a BEST bus in Mumbai.
Many people shared the same video claiming it was from Mumbai on Twitter and Facebook.
We also found some people sharing the video claiming that it was from Delhi.
WHAT WE FOUND
On watching the video and listening to the audio, we could clearly hear people chattering in Bengali throughout. While passengers could be heard complaining about the lack of vehicles and transport (in Bengali), someone, ostensibly the bus conductor, can be heard saying, “Aste uthun, aste uthun”. (Translation: Get up slowly, get up slowly.)
This made it clear that the video could not be from Mumbai, where the language used would have been Marathi or maybe Hindi, certainly not Bengali.
Using this as a clue, we ran a keyword search on Twitter and came across many people sharing it as from Kolkata.
The user who uploaded the below video also said in the comments that this was from Kolkata, in answer to people’s questions about the location.
We also found some people who had originally shared the video as Mumbai correcting themselves to say that it was Kolkata.
During our search on Twitter, we also found a thread by a user called anv#. In the other video, uploaded on the thread, we can see what appears to be the same bus, but before the doors are opened. Outside the doors, the same blue covers can be seen and the inside of the bus looks exactly the same as in the viral video.
In this video, someone can be heard saying, again in Bengali, that the bus will be travelling till Titagarh. Titagarh is a town in West Bengal, close to Kolkata.
Further, The Quint reached out to the Twitter user whose thread we have referred to above, who clicked a photo of the area seen outside the bus and sent it to us, identifying it as Barrackpore Chiriamore crossing. The other landmark visible in the photo is a board saying Lalkunthi Fire Station.
While the angles are slightly different, the same yellow board with the red writing can be seen. The same blue tarpaulin covers can also be seen. If looked at closely, the first letter of the writing on the board in the screenshot of the video can also be identified as ‘S’.
Moreover, we also ran a Google search for the restaurant that can be seen in the photo sent to us, S Lazeez. The address of this restaurant listed online was ‘Chiriamore Barrackpre, opposite Lalkuthi Fire Station’, which matched what we were told by the person who took the photograph.
A search on Google Earth for ‘S Lazeez’ also showed us that the area was indeed Barrackpore Chiriamore. Barrackpore is a town adjacent to Kolkata.
Therefore, it is clear that a video from a town in West Bengal close to Kolkata is being shared with the claim that it is from Mumbai or Delhi.
(Note: An earlier version of this story mentioned that the location of the video was Kolkata. The story has now been updated to reflect that the location of the video is actually Barrackpore, a town adjacent to Kolkata.)
(This video was first fact-checked by Alt News.)
(You can read all our coronavirus related fact-checked stories here.)
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