Multiple posts are going viral on social media platforms claiming that the Government of India has announced a free smartphone scheme. Alongside these posts (here, here, and here), several purported videos are also being circulated, showing PM Modi allegedly announcing a free smartphone scheme and stating that “very little time is left, and the scheme will end soon.” In this article, we fact-check the claim made in these posts.
Claim: Videos showing Prime Minister Modi announcing a free smartphone scheme.
Fact: The Government of India, PM Modi has not announced any free smartphone scheme. The viral videos showing Prime Minister Modi announcing such a scheme are fake and digitally altered. They were created by modifying the audio of the original video. 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 smartphone scheme. 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 had recently been announced or launched. However, we found no information supporting the claim.
Upon closely examining the viral videos, we noticed that the audio does not match Prime Minister Modi’s lip movements while he is speaking. This suggests that the videos may have been altered. To learn more about these viral videos, we conducted a Google reverse image search using keyframes from them. This search led us to the original versions of the videos. The first video shows PM Modi’s speech at the launch of the PM Kisan Samman Nidhi Yojana in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh, on 24 February 2019 (here, here). The second video shows Prime Minister Modi’s speech at a 2025 Bihar Assembly elections rally organised by the NDA in Begusarai, Bihar, on 24 October 2025 (here, here).
At no point in these speeches does he mention or announce any free smartphone scheme. We then analysed the viral videos using multiple AI voice-detection tools, including Resemble AI and Hiya. The results indicated that the audio in the viral videos is likely AI-generated. Based on this information, it is evident that the viral videos are fake and digitally altered. They were created by modifying the audio of the original footage.
Upon reviewing the accounts posting these claims (here, here, and here), we found that these accounts regularly share misinformation and AI-generated videos of Prime Minister Modi, falsely claiming that he announced several free schemes, including a free bike scheme, a free electric cycle scheme, among others.
To sum up, the viral videos showing PM Modi announcing a free smartphone scheme are fake and digitally altered.
