Do These Videos Show Elephants and JCBs in Hyderabad’s Kancha Gachibowli? No!

Both videos are old and have no connection to the land clearing drives in Hyderabad by the Telangana government.

A set of videos showing elephants and construction equipment — colloquially called JCB — have gone viral on social media, where users have linked them to recent deforestation drives at the Kancha Gachibowli forests near Hyderabad Central University.

• The first clip shows an elephant, lying on the ground, being pushed by a JCB.

(Archived versions of more posts sharing this clip can be seen here and here.)

• The second video shows a massive tusker pushing against and battling a JCB on an empty patch of land as people watch.

(Archived versions of more posts sharing this clip can be seen here and here.)

But...?: Neither of the videos have any connection to the ongoing land-clearing drives and protests in Hyderabad.

• The first clip has been on the internet since 2018, while the second video dates back to February 2025 and shows visuals from West Bengal's Jalpaiguri.

How did we find out the truth?: For the first clip, we ran a reverse image search using Google Lens and Google Images.

• The search led us to a YouTube video on a channel called 'Prime Wild', which had shared the same clip on 6 October 2023.

• We also came across another channel, 'CP Wild Lanka', which had shared a longer version of this video on their channel on 2 August 2018.

The viral clip can be seen starting around the 06:50-minute mark in their video.

The second video: For the clip of the elephant battling the JCB, we ran a keyword search using 'Elephant fights JCB' as the search term.

• This led us to a clip uploaded to India Today North East's verified YouTube channel on 4 February.

• The video's title and description said that it showed visuals from West Bengal's Jalpaiguri, where "a JCB crane was used to drive away an elephant that had wandered out of the Apal Chand forest."

• The incident was widely covered by news organisations, with an NDTV report that saying that the elephant had come out in search for food when it was chased by locals operating the crane.

• The elephant fought with the crane, causing injuries to its forehead and trubk as it ran back to the forest.

Conclusion: Two old, unrelated videos are being shared to falsely claim that they show recent visuals of elephants in Hyderabad's Kancha Gachibowli.

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