On 3 April 2025, the Supreme Court of India ordered a stay (here, here and here) on the tree felling activities being carried out by the Telangana government within the 400 acres of the Kancha Gachibowli region adjacent to the University of Hyderabad. As per the reports (here, here, and here), this region is home to several species of flora and fauna, which include migratory birds, peacocks, wild animals like spotted deer, wild boars, Indian rock python, Indian star tortoises, etc. As per news reports from April 2025, two deer in this region died (here, here, here, here, and here) in the aftermath of the Telangana government clearing the land in question.
As reports emerge that the wildlife at the University of Hyderabad got disrupted due to the clearing of trees in the Kancha Gachibowli region, a video (here, here and here) of an elephant allegedly being attacked by an excavator is being shared on social media. It is being claimed that this video is from Hyderabad. We will fact-check this claim through this article.
Claim: Video of an Elephant being attacked by an excavator in Hyderabad.
Fact: This video has nothing to do with the recent (March-April 2025) issue of the Kancha Gachibowli region adjacent to the University of Hyderabad. It has been available on the internet since August 2018. Hence, the claim made in the post is False.
While verifying the claim, we observed a watermark on the viral video that reads ‘Prime Wild.’ Taking this as a hint, we performed a keyword search on the internet and found the same video on a YouTube channel named ‘Prime Wild.’ This video was uploaded on 6 October 2023 with a title that reads ‘Injured elephant for help JCB 🐘❤| Jungle Animals | 象 | الفيل | Wildlife | Animaux #shorts.’
This makes it clear that the video is old and not related to the recent Kacha Gachibowli land issue in Hyderabad, Telangana.
During this search, we also found a longer version of this video on ‘Prime Wild’s’ YouTube channel. This was uploaded by them on 19 January 2023 with a title that says ‘Treating a wild elephant that is sick and unable to walk | Amazing Elephant Elephant |’. This visual seen in the viral video can be found at around 4:51 mark in this video. A cropped and horizontally flipped version is what we see in the viral video.
However, details of the location where this video was taken were not mentioned in this video. To learn more about it, we performed a reverse image search on the internet using a few keyframes from the viral video.
This search led us to another version of the video uploaded on a YouTube channel named ‘cp wild Lanka.’ This was uploaded on 2 August 2018 with a title that reads ‘Tusker attacked by elephant !’ The video’s description said, ‘This elephant was attacked by another fellow tusker in Horoupothana. A team of wildlife officers injecting medicine to the animal as a treatment for the wounds but unfortunately the animal died due to several injuries.’
You can find the visuals seen in the viral video from the 6:56 mark of this video. However, nothing was mentioned about the location where this incident happened.
Further, we performed another keyword search on the internet to find Sri Lankan news reports related to this incident. However, we could not find any such reports. Although we could not independently verify the location details of the video, it has been available on the internet since 2018 — well before the 2025 Kancha Gachibowli land incident. Therefore, we can conclude that this viral video is unrelated to the recent incident.
To sum up, an old and unrelated video is being falsely linked to the Kancha Gachibowli land issue in Hyderabad.
