FALSE: This video is not of India’s Minister for Housing falling into a septic tank
The incident involves Bharatiya Janata Party MP Poonamben Hematbhai Maadam and not the Housing minister.
This Facebook post with a video claiming to depict India’s Minister for Housing and Urban Affairs falling into a septic tank under construction is FALSE.
In the video, a woman and some individuals plunge into a trench as the platform they are standing on collapses.
The accompanying text claims that the collapse can be blamed on substandard workmanship due to corruption and fake qualifications.
PesaCheck performed a Google reverse image search of the video’s screengrab and the results showed that Shri Hardeep Singh Puri, the Indian Minister for Housing, was not among those who fell into the drain.
A video published on 16 May 2016 shows the incident involved BJP Member of Parliament Poonamben Hematbhai Maadam and not the Minister for Housing and Urban Affairs.
According to media reports, Maadam sustained injuries after accidentally falling into a 10-foot drain in Jamnagar, Gujarat. This happened as she conversed with people standing on a slab during demolitions in the locality. The slab gave way, hence the incident.
PesaCheck has looked into a Facebook post with a video supposedly of India’s Minister for Housing and Urban Affairs falling into a septic tank under construction and finds it to be FALSE.
This post is part of an ongoing series of PesaCheck fact-checks examining content marked as potential misinformation on Facebook and other social media platforms.
By partnering with Facebook and similar social media platforms, third-party fact-checking organisations like PesaCheck are helping to sort fact from fiction. We do this by giving the public deeper insight and context to posts they see in their social media feeds.
This fact-check was written by PesaCheck fact-checker Pius Enywaru and edited by PesaCheck senior copy editor Cédrick Irakoze and acting chief copy editor Francis Mwaniki.
The article was approved for publication by PesaCheck’s managing editor Doreen Wainainah.
PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein and is being incubated by the continent’s largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape the government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water/sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org.
PesaCheck is an initiative of Code for Africa, through its innovateAFRICA fund, with support from Deutsche Welle Akademie, in partnership with a coalition of local African media and other civic watchdog organisations.
