As India celebrates Chhath Puja 2025 (here, here, here, and here), a purported video claiming to show Prime Minister Modi announcing a free bike scheme for the occasion is going viral on social media platforms (here, here, here, and here). Through this article, let us fact-check the claim made in the post.
Claim: Video of Prime Minister Modi announcing a free bike scheme for Chhath Puja 2025.
Fact: This viral video showing Prime Minister Modi announcing a free bike scheme for Chhath Puja 2025 is fake and digitally altered. It was created by modifying the audio of the original video. The original footage shows a speech delivered by Prime Minister Modi at the launch of the PM-KISAN scheme in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, on 24 February 2019. In the speech, Modi talks about farmers, the PM-KISAN scheme, and other initiatives related to agriculture. Nowhere in that speech does he mention any free bike scheme or any other schemes related to automobiles. Hence the claim made in the post is FALSE.
We conducted a relevant keyword search to verify whether Prime Minister Modi had recently announced any free bike scheme on the occasion of Chhath Puja 2025. However, we did not find any credible media reports or official announcements supporting this claim. If Prime Minister Modi had indeed announced such a scheme, it would have been reported by multiple media outlets.
We also reviewed the Government of India’s MyScheme official portal and the press releases issued by the Press Information Bureau to check whether any such scheme was recently announced or launched. However, we found no related information supporting the claim.
To find more details about the viral video, we conducted a Google reverse image search using keyframes from the video. This search led us to the original video uploaded on the official YouTube channel of the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) India on 24 February 2019, titled “PM Modi’s speech at the launch of PM Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana in Gorakhpur, UP.” We also found that this video was live-streamed by the official YouTube channels of the Parliament of India, the Government of Uttar Pradesh, All India Radio, and the Bharatiya Janata Party on the same date.
In this speech, Prime Minister Modi talks about farmers, the PM-KISAN scheme, and other initiatives related to agriculture. Nowhere in that speech does he mention any free bike scheme or any other schemes related to automobiles. The full transcript of this speech in English, shared by the Press Information Bureau (PIB), can be seen here.
We then ran the viral video through multiple AI voice detection tools, including Resemble AI and Hiya. The results indicated that the audio in the viral video is likely AI-generated. Based on this information, it is evident that the viral video is fake and digitally altered. It was created by modifying the audio of the original video.
Upon reviewing the Instagram page @bhartisarkari7, we found that it regularly shares misinformation and AI-generated videos of Prime Minister Modi, falsely claiming that he announced several free schemes, including a free recharge scheme, among others.
To sum it up, this viral video showing Prime Minister Modi announcing a free bike scheme for Chhath Puja 2025 is fake and has been created by altering the audio of the original video.
