When reports emerged that parts of a newly constructed road in the northern Indian city of Ayodhya had collapsed due to heavy rains in June 2024, an old video surfaced in social media posts that wrongly depicted it as the destroyed road. However, the video had previously circulated online in posts about a collapsed footpath in northeastern Brazil in June 2022.
The video was shared with the false claim on social media platform X on July 3, 2024.
It shows someone walking along a road and falling off a stretch of road that suddenly collapses.
“The Rampath road in Ayodhya is in this state after the first rains,” reads part of the caption of the post, referring to a newly constructed city road in the northern holy city that local media reported saw parts collapse due to monsoon flooding last month (archived link).
The report then appeared to criticise the quality of recent infrastructure in Ayodhya.
The city saw a inflow of projects alongside the construction of a large temple for the deity Ram, which was built on the site of a centuries-old mosque that was razed to the ground by Hindu zealots in 1992 (archived link).
Hindu nationalist Prime Minister Narendra Modi opened the temple in January in a ceremony that was celebrated across India with successive television broadcasts and street parties.
The video was also shared with similar claims on Facebook.
It was also shared in other to inform who wrongly linked it to the state of Gujarat, where road collapses also occurred recently reported (archived link).
The state is a stronghold of Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party.
Brazil news reports
However, a reverse image search on Google revealed that the video is horizontally flipped from footage published by the Brazilian media outlet UOL on June 2, 2022 (archived link).
The report said security camera footage showed a woman falling into a crater in the municipality of Cascavel in the northeastern Brazilian state of Ceará.
Below is a screenshot of the video shared in the fake posts (left) and the footage uploaded in the media report (right):
A yellow bus that appears at the 10-second mark of the video has “Escolar” — which means “school” in Portuguese — written on the side. School buses in Brazil often have an “Escolar” sign.
Local media g1 And O Povo also shared the video in reports of the incident from Cascavel, which stated that the sidewalk gave way due to the heavy rainfall in the area (archived links) here And here).
Police in Ayodhya also refuted claims about the video in a statement about X on July 4, 2024.
Police Chief Madhuvan Kumar Singh said a case has been filed against two people for sharing the photo on social media (archived link).
