Social media is abuzz with a video clip (here and here) of school children wearing uniforms, allegedly from Kerala, crossing a huge river atop a pulley cable crossing. This is being described as the school life of these children in Kerala. We fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Visuals of school children riskily crossing a river on a pulley cable crossing to attend school in Kerala.
Fact: This video clip is from a documentary series, ‘ Most Dangerous Ways To School.’ This clip has been taken from the Nepal episode of this series, which shows school children from the mountain village of Kumpur, Nepal, crossing a river on a Cable crossing(Tuin)to attend their school. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
To check the veracity of the claim, we first performed a keyword search on the internet, looking for news reports on the alleged situation of school children having to cross the river in Kerala on cable crossing. This search did not yield any credible reports. During this search, we found a few articles (here and here) and videos on the internet that had visuals of school children travelling on cable crossings in Nepal to reach school.
Taking this as a hint and suspecting the viral video could have been shot in Nepal, we performed another search on the internet looking for the original version of the viral video and found it in the form of an episode from a documentary series named ‘Most Dangerous Ways To School’ uploaded on a YouTube channel named ‘Free Documentary.’
This is the Nepal episode of the documentary series that shows various hardships students go through on their way to reach their schools in different parts of the world.
The watermark of the YouTube channel @FreeDocumentary can also be seen in the viral video. You can find the visuals seen in the viral video here in this documentary episode.
To sum up, this video does not show school children from Kerala travelling on a cable crossing on their way to school.
