A photo through a post is being widely shared on social media claiming that Lord Ram’s image had been printed on India’s new 500-rupee note. Let us fact-check the claim made in the post.
Claim: Image of Lord Ram has been printed on India’s new five hundred rupee note.
Fact: There are no pictures of Lord Ram printed on India’s new 500-rupee notes. If there were new 500-rupee notes with the picture of Lord Ram on it, the Reserve Bank of India would have notified it on the website. There were no such press releases in the RBI website. The latest 500-rupee note printed was the Mahatma Gandhi (New) Series (MGNS) which was introduced way back in 2016. Hence, the claim made in the post is FALSE.
When reverse image search is done on the viral photo, a similar photo of was found in shutter shock, a stock photo website. But the stock photo had the image of Mahatma Gandhi, and not Lord Ram. Everything else in the stock photo is the same, except the image of Mahatma Gandhi right in the middle of the note. Even the series on the stock photo is same as the one in the viral photo. Hence, the photo of Lord Ram was morphed onto the image of Mahatma Gandhi to make it look real.
If there were new 500-rupee notes with the picture of Lord Ram on it, the Reserve Bank of India would have notified it on its website. There were no such press releases in the RBI website. The latest 500-rupee note printed was way back in 2016. The Mahatma Gandhi (New) Series (MGNS) was introduced in the year 2016 when demonetisation was announced by the Prime Minister.
To sum it up, this photo of a new 500-rupee note had been morphed with the image of Lord Ram.
