Viral Images of Ganga river has photos wrongly captioned.

Under #10YearChallenge , a comparision image is viral, also tweeted by official handle. The image shows a dirty, garbage filled ghat on left claiming to be of year 2009 (Ganga during Congress Govt,) and on right a clean, beautiful looking Ganga Ghat claimed to be of 2019 (Ganga during BJP Govt.).

Mrs. Srinivasan’s, General Secretary – @BJP4Tamilnadu, tweet says
“#10YearChallenge 2014 : Ganga under Congress Govt 2019 : Ganga under BJP Govt”

#10YearChallenge

2014 : Ganga under Congress Govt
2019 : Ganga under BJP Govt pic.twitter.com/esr1Ldxinp

— Vanathi Srinivasan (@VanathiBJP) January 18, 2019

The Frustrated Indian

Cleaner, fresher and breathable Ganga- Namami Gange pic.twitter.com/M4CPtliQlU

— The Frustrated Indian (@FrustIndian) January 17, 2019

Rightlog.in

‘Now what is new in this? There are million of such posts by political parties,’ you may ask. We found this random image worth taking up because it showed the work done on cleaning the Ganga river by the Central Government. The river is revered by many Hindus, but is considered to be the second most polluting river in the world because of a lot of industries discharging waste in the river. Moreover, immersing flowers, corpses and other paraphernalia as part of rituals has also contributed to this trouble, especially in Varanasi, a holy city.

Mr. Keshaboina’s, the OBC Public Secretary for BJP Telangana and Vanathi Srinivasan, tweet –

#ModiQuotaSop Cleaner, fresher Ganga! #NamamiGange#10YearChallenge pic.twitter.com/5kkBNnOyHC

— keshaboinasridhar (@keshaboinasri) January 17, 2019

This post on Modi Mattoome, a Kannada page says, “How was the Ganga and how does it look after 5 years?” has received more than 3000 likes, and more than 4000 shares.

TRUTH

In last clarification, many social media users came up with different arguments claiming

• The photo used is representational, but is it ? the word “Representational” is not written anywhere which media houses use.
• Few claims that there had been many changes for good, but then why not use the real photos ?

After extensive digging in, SMHoaxSlayer could finally get the truth of the image.

Let us divide this image into two parts for further explanation

Clean photo –

Not 2019 is actually 2009, i.e. 10 years ago So it was under Congress Govt.

Reverse searching this image showed that this image was taken in  March, 2009. This image was clicked by Ken Wieland to which Wikipedia gave credit to.

On Wikipedia itself a raw, high resolution image is available. Using forensics on the photo we found the following –

Metadata of the image tells us that the photo has been taken on 30th March 2009, by Canon PowerShot G9

Dirty Photo –

Not 2009, it’s 2011, so although the year is wrong but was under Congress Government, So that part is true.

The first source of the image was actually a file photo from an article on Outlook Magazine dated 23 June, 2015. This photograph was clicked by Jitender Gupta, who works for the magazine. SMHoaxSlayer contacted him and he clarified that this photo was taken in 2011

This is not the first time that fake social media posts like these have been shared. SMHoaxSlayer had uncovered a similar post forwarded by Nation With Namo, on Facebook and Twitter.

BJP’s #10YearChallenge used old images as current achievements.

In 2016, as work done in 2 years, MyGovIndia, an official government branch, used a photo from Africa claiming to be “Then” in Then and Now of India –

क्या भारत ने अफ्रीका में रोड बना दिया, हमारा देश आगे बढ़ गया ? Government is accountable and should not use wrong photos.

Not only this, there were similar reports of such incidents where the BJP IT cell has been peddling fake news. Recently, Bangalore Mirror published an article about a fake post on the Western Peripheral Expressway under the #10YearChallenge hashtag. The post showed photos from the Lucknow Agra Expressway in 2009 and the Delhi Meerut Expressway in 2019. (Refer to )

More Fakes

#10YearChallenge #Ganga pic.twitter.com/wQ6NC8HMNp

— Vallanda Prash (@TigerSpeaketh) January 19, 2019

Cleaner, fresher and breathable Ganga- Namami Gange#10yearchallenge pic.twitter.com/4DbxRduZPx

— Umesh sharma (@SharmausUmesh) January 17, 2019

Cleaner, fresher and breathable Ganga- Namami Gange #10yearchallenge pic.twitter.com/INPSu9MAxZ

— Navneet Sharma 🇮🇳 (@Inavaneet) January 17, 2019