Fact-check: 2017 photo falsely shared as Kerala’s Vande Bharat Express flagged off last week

The photograph of a loco pilot holding an umbrella in an engine with the claim that rainwater was leaking through the roof of the Vande Bharat Express in Kerala before its debut journey attracted massive attention on social media. But that was not the case - the photograph dated back to 2017.

The photograph was circulated a day after Prime Minister Narendra Modi flagged off Kerala’s first Vande Bharat Express from Thiruvananthapuram to Kasaragod on April 26. It was shared widely with many thousand views.

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A PTI fact-check found that water leakage from an AC vent in one of its compartments was reported when the train was parked at Kannur on April 25, and railway officials repaired it on April 26. There was no water leakage in the engine. A subsequent investigation showed the photo shared on social media was a screenshot of a video shot in Jharkhand in 2017.

A Twitter post on April 26 read, “MODI's ‘VANDE BHARAT’ is a disaster same, like Modi. On the 1st day of the inauguration, rainwater started leaking from the roof of VB in Kerala. Picture speaks for itself (Sic).” The post garnered over 67,000 views, more than 1,700 likes and 800 retweets in two days. Multiple users shared the same photo with the same claim on Twitter and Facebook.

The fact-check team began its investigation with a Google Reverse Image Search on the photo. It found an old video in a tweet posted by journalist Sucheta Dalal on August 9, 2017 showing the same loco pilot holding an umbrella in the engine with water leaking from the roof.

The team then did a customised Google search with specific keywords and came across a report by The Indian Express, published on August 11, 2017, with the headline, “Train driver holds an umbrella to save control panel from a leaky roof, video goes viral.”

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The report included the Twitter post by the journalist and a response from the Railway Ministry posted on August 9, 2017. It said it was a dead engine hauled by another engine from the front.

Subsequently, an extended version of the same video uploaded on YouTube by a Bengali news outlet named Sangbad Pratidin on August 11, 2017 was found.

At the 00:16-minute timestamp, the person recording the video addresses the loco pilot as BK Mandal from Chandrapura, a town in Jharkhand's Bokaro district.

The desk noticed the station signage “Bermo” at the 1:17-minute timestamp in the YouTube video. Bermo railway station is in the Bokaro district of Jharkhand and falls under the Dhanbad railway division of the East-Central Railway zone.

In the next part of the investigation, the fact-check team searched Google for reports of any water leakage in the recently launched Vande Bharat Express in Kerala. It found a report by the Times Now website with the headline, “New Kerala Vande Bharat Express 'Leaks' Amid Rain in Kannur; Repaired”.

“Railway officials have informed us that it is not a big leak and was only inside one coach. The leak was noticed on Wednesday morning, after which technical experts of the railways arrived at the spot after which the leak was plugged,” read the Times Now report published on April 26.

The desk concluded that the photo shared in the recent social media posts on Kerala's first Vande Bharat Express was a screenshot of a video shot in a dead engine in 2017.