Old Video of Karnataka's Jog Falls Circulated as Athirappally Falls in Kerala

This video of Jog Falls in Karnataka is an old one, an official of Karnataka tourism told us.

The claim states that the photo is of the Athirappally falls in Kerala. 

(Photo: Altered by The Quint)

A video of a waterfall is being shared with the claim that it shows the Athirappally waterfall in Thrissur district of Kerala.

However, we found that the video is an old one from Jog Falls in Shimoga district of Karnataka. Assistant director of Karnataka tourism, Shimoga (or Shivamogga) district, confirmed the same to The Quint and shared with us a recent video of the waterfall.

The Sharavati river takes a spectacular plunge from a height of 830 ft in four distinct cascades – locally known as Raja, Rani, Roarer and Rocket. The famous destination attracts lakhs of tourists every year.

Claim

The video has been shared by filmmaker Parthiban Shanmugam with the same claim.

The video, posted on 14 September, has around 2,500 views at the time of writing this article.

An archive of the post can be found here. 

Several social media users have shared the video along with the same claims and the archived links can be found here, here, and here.

The claim was also shared in 2020 along with the same claim and an archived link can be seen here.

What We Found

One of the comments on the video pointed out that the video was from Jog falls in Karnataka and not Athirappally falls.

Taking a cue from here, we searched on YouTube and found one video on the channel of Loksatta, a Marathi daily of the Indian Express group, published on 8 August 2019.

We looked into the video and found several elements from the video matched with the one that is claimed to be Athirappally falls.

Screengrab from viral vidro (L), Screengrab from Loksatta (R)

Further, we reached out to the assistant director of Karnataka tourism, Shimoga, HS Ramakrishna, who confirmed to The Quint that the video was indeed from Jog Falls.

Next, we also reached out to a local reporter from Shimoga, who too confirmed that the video is from Jog Falls.

We also looked for the street view of Jog Falls on Google and found a photo of it.

Clearly, a video of the Jog Falls in Karnataka is being shared with the false claim that it is of Athirapally falls.

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