A post with the image of a sinkhole which opened up along the road is doing rounds on social media with the claim that the image is from Banaras, Uttar Pradesh. Through this article, lets fact-check the claim made in the post.
Claim: Image of a sinkhole which opened up along the roadway in Banaras, Uttar Pradesh.
Fact: This image is doing rounds on the internet for a few years now. Also, in the image, we can see AMC written on a barricade which stands for Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation. When we compare the image in the post to the screenshot from the video of a sinkhole which opened up along a road in Ahmedabad, we can see similar barricades with AMC written on it. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
Reverse image search of the image led us to many social media posts which shared the same image. One such post by Sanjay Singh, MP Rajya Sabha dates back to 27 July 2017. This makes it clear that the image is not new to social media.
If we take a close look at the better version of the same image shared by the MP, we can see the letters ‘AMC’ written on the barricades which stands for Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation, also written in Gujarati.
Taking a cue from here, we ran a search on YouTube using the keywords ‘Ahmedabad Swastik intersection sinkhole 2017’. We then found a news video which reported an incident of a sinkhole which opened up along the swastika intersection road, Ahmedabad. Though the video is uploaded on 26 June 2019, in the video we can find barricades similar to those in the image in the post. Also, in the video, we can see ‘AMC’ written on the barricade. With this, we can infer that the image in the post is from Gujarat.
In 2018 when the same image along with few other images went viral with the claim that the images are from Varanasi, India Today has debunked the claim which can be read here.
To sum it up, image of a sinkhole which opened up along the roadway is from Ahmedabad.
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