Several Facebook and Twitter users have shared a 40-second video of a man riding a bike while pushing a mini-Ferris wheel on the road. A woman is sitting along with luggage in one of the seats in the mini-Ferris wheel. “This migrant labour in India surely deserves an award for their Brains, innovation & Practical and workable solutions He has removed the front wheel of his bike & welded his bike to the giant wheel with tyres. He has put a charpoy on top to sleep also,” is the claim shared with the clip.
On May 16, Twitter user @IndurChhugani posted the viral video along with the viral text. The user gave the video courtesy to Shashi Bhagnari. This tweet has been retweeted over 900 times and has over 48,000 views.
Fact-check
Alt News performed a reverse image search of the first frame of the viral video on Yandex and found that the video was uploaded in November 2018 by Time For Utpatang, a YouTube account.
Since the video was posted in 2018 it cannot depict a recent video of a migrant labourer. Additionally, there is a considerable amount of traffic and the person riding the bike isn’t wearing a mask.
Prior to our report, Social Media Hoax Slayer published a fact-check report and found out that the viral video was published by News18 Gujarati journalist Sandhya Panchal in 2018.
While social media users didn’t explicitly state that the video is recent, the fact they mentioned that it shows a migrant labourer is misleading enough for people to think it represents an incident that took place during the lockdown.