2018 Video Shared As Crowded Kolkata Station During COVID-19

The video was from Ranaghat railway station and was shot much before the coronavirus pandemic started.

Fact-Check on Kolkata Station Video: An old video from 2018 was shared with a false claim that it showed a huge number of people boarding a train in Kolkata during the coronavirus pandemic.

(Photo: Screenshot/YouTube)

A video of a packed railway station has gone viral on social media with the claim that it shows a crowd boarding a train in Kolkata, seemingly ignoring social distancing norms, after the suburban services resumed in the city on 11 November.

However, we found that the video was shot in 2018 at West Bengal’s Ranaghat railway station much before the coronavirus pandemic started and social distancing norms were put in place.

CLAIM

One of the captions along with the viral video reads: “Scene at Sealdah, Kolkata station - Today 1st local train after it was opened. Corona special?? (sic)”

An archive of the post can be found here.

The same video was also shared with other captions such as: “कोरोना की ऐसी की तैसी|” [Translation: To hell with corona.]

An archive of the post can be found here.

An archive of the post can be found here.

An archive of the post can be found here.

We found that the video is also being circulated on WhatsApp.

WHAT WE FOUND OUT

We extracted the keyframes using the InVID WeVerify Google Chome Extension and conducted a reverse image search. While going through the results, we found some posts from September 2018.

We found a post that had the same video and was published on 23 September 2018. It was captioned: “Ranaghat station Today 8.30am....krishnanagar Bongaon local.”

An archive of the post can be found here.

We searched for the keyword “Ranaghat railway station” and found several other posts containing the same video from 2018 on Facebook and YouTube.

An archive of the post can be found here.

Two local residents confirmed to The Quint that the station seen in the viral video is Ranaghat.

We also found the same video uploaded on 23 September 2018, geo-tagged on Google Maps as Ranaghat railway Station.

A link to the Google Maps result can be found here.

Evidently, an old video from 2018 was shared with a false claim that it showed a huge number of people getting on a train in Kolkata during the coronavirus pandemic.

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