An old video is being falsely shared as visuals of snowfall in Haryana - FACTLY
Sai Krishna Muthyanolla
January 19, 2023
A widely circulated social media video claims that it shows visuals of snowfall in Haryana’s Barwala. In the video, one can see a road covered with some white snowlike matter. Let’s fact-check this claim.
Claim: The video shows visuals of snow-filled roads in Haryana’s Barwala.
Fact: There are no news reports of any snowfall in Barwala, Haryana, neither in the past nor currently. An extended version of the viral video is on the internet from March 2020. Dainik Bhaskar reported news of a Hailstorm in Haryana’s Barwala in March 2020. A photo in that report matches the visuals of the viral video. A few social media posts from March 2020 by a local journalist, media outlets etc., contain videos of the hailstorm that occurred around the same time. Contrary to the viral post’s claim, all these news reports or social media posts show a hailstorm but not a snowfall. Hence the claim made in the post is MISLEADING.
To know more details about the alleged snowfall in Haryana’s Barwala, we performed a keyword search on the internet. We found an extended version of the viral video on a YouTube channel named ‘Pk Campus 007’ titled ‘Barwala by pass # hailstorm #full rain fall barwala news.‘ This video was uploaded on 14 March 2020.
We took a hint from the title and looked for news reports on this incident. Dainik Bhaskar Haryana uploaded a photo of their news report on 15 March 2020. The location in the photo matches with that of the viral video.
Google street view of the location also matches the location in the Dainik Bhaskar Photo. This evidence indicates that the video was indeed from 2020 and is of a hail storm that happened at that time.
A few social media posts by a local Journalist, a media outlet etc., uploaded on 14 March 2020, contain videos showing a hailstorm in Barwala, Haryana. Those videos can be watched here, here and here. Dainik Jagran also published another news on the effects the hailstorm on the local crop farms; this article was published on 17 March 2020. None of these reports mentions snow or snowfall. The viral post falsely claims the video of a hailstorm as snowfall.
To sum up, an old video of a hailstorm is being falsely shared as the visuals of snowfall in Haryana.