Guwahati: Remember the video of a migrant woman precariously balancing her infant while sitting on the coupler of two bogies of a speeding train that did its viral rounds on social media? PIB’s fact-checker team just stated that the video is a fake one and is not even from India.
Claim-A video of a woman with an infant travelling between train bogies is circulating in social media stating these are migrants trying to go home during #Lockdown due to #Covid19India#PIBFactCheck: #FakeNews. This is an old video from before 2016, from Bangladesh & not India pic.twitter.com/aXySNnTnBJ
— PIB Fact Check (@PIBFactCheck) May 18, 2020
The video was shared in various media portals as well in a way to showcase the actual plight of migrant workers as they had to opt for such dangerous ways for their travel during the lockdown. The same video was shared/uploaded on YouTube by a news portal from Bangladesh Prothom Alo on September 13, 2016. The video was entitled, “Eid means returning home, mentally or physically.”
The oldest vestiges of this video were found on July 31, 2016, in a certain other YouTube channel entitled “Refugee mother and child.”
The same video was also shared during 2020 Mother’s Day (May 10)
As of now, a total of 1,074 ‘Shramik Special’ trains have been made operational from various states across the country as of the midnight of May 15, 2020. Started on May 1, these special trains have been bringing more than 14 lakh stranded people back to their home states in the last 15 days, the Union ministry of railways said in a statement on Saturday.