A video showing the Director General of the National Cadet Corps (NCC), Lieutenant Virendra Vats, purportedly talking about Pakistani drones crossing the border and entering India is being shared on social media.
What does he say?: In the video, Lt Vats is claimed to have said,
"Pakistani drones reached Delhi and even Gujarat as per our intelligence reports in May this year. Had they actually struck and not gone back, we would have suffered huge losses. Sadly, we don't have the same advanced technology which Pakistan has. It is partly due to their collaborations with Turkey and China. In my opinion, it will take more than 50 years for India just to remain at par with Pakistan in terms of drone technology. Countering China is out of question, India will never be able to do it."
But...?: The video has been altered to mislead viewers.
Originally, the video shows Lt Vats talking about drones playing a part in India's economy and a potential group called the National Cyber Cadet Corps.
How did we find out?: We ran a keyword search with the term 'NCC DG drones' to look for the video.
We came across many posts sharing the video in the claim, but none of them were from credible or official sources.
Since we spotted news agency IANS' logo on the top right corner of the video, we added 'IANS' as a keyword to the search term.
This led us to an X post by IANS' official account, which showed similar visuals of Lt Vats.
In this video, he spoke about drones playing "a major part in our economy," and their ability to "reinforce our defence forces," among other advantages of drones.
He went on to speak in Hindi, talking about potentially having a National Cyber Cadet Corps, which may give some candidates special, top-notch cyber training.
He did not mention Pakistan, China, or India being inferior in terms of drone technology, indicating that the video in the claim was an altered one.
PIB clarifies: The Press Information Bureau's fact-checking wing shared a post calling out this claim on their official Facebook page.
Calling it a "digitally manipulated video," the post noted that "This AI-generated fake video is being circulated to mislead the public."
The Quint ran the video through Hive Moderation's and Hiya's deepfake detection tool, both of which were unable to confidently and conclusively identify the video as an AI-generated one.
Conclusion: An altered video of NCC DG Lt Virendra Vats is being shared to falsely claim that he spoke about Pakistan's drones reaching Gujarat and Delhi in May 2025.
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