Fact Check: Viral picture of people sitting inside sewer pipes is from Bangladesh, not India

New Delhi: A photograph of children living inside sewage pipes is going viral on social media with the claim that it is a real picture of slums in India. The picture claims that this is the deplorable living conditions of Indian children in a slum.

What is going viral?

A post on Facebook having a caption in the Malayalam language to one such image is going viral.

The user shared this image and wrote “കഷ്ടം, .. ഇന്ത്യൻ തെരുവ് കളിലെ കാഴ്ച്ച യാണിത്, ഇവിടെ യാണ് രാമന് വേണ്ടി ക്ഷേത്രം പണിയുന്നത്. എന്റെ നാടിനെ ഓർത്തു ഞാൻ തല താഴ്ത്തുന്നു ” which translates to English as, “Image shows the condition of children in Indian slums. This is the same nation where a grand temple for Rama is being built.”

This post was shared by a Facebook user named ‘Rema Devi’ on 5 August. The user hail from Mallapural and have a total of 983 followers on Facebook.

Investigation

Newsroompost did some research and we found out that this claim is absolutely false. Actually this picture is from Bangladesh.

To investigate the post, we first took a screenshot of this picture and did a reverse image search on google. We found that the viral photograph is seven years old and was taken in Bangladesh by the Bangladeshi photographer Faisal Azim.

This image was featured in the Daily Mail on July 10, 2014. The article was about the best environmental photographs.

According to the article, the image titled “Life in the circle” was captured in the year 2013 in Bangladesh and it won Faisal Azim, the Atkins CityScape Award in 2014.

We also found this picture in a news published on August 14, 2015 on the website of economictimes.indiatimes.com/. The news was about Bangladesh photographer Faizal Azim who finished second in the ‘National Geographic Traveler Photo Contest’ in 2015.

Besides, several other websites publishing award-winning environment photographs have also featured the viral picture with the claim that it is from Bangladesh.

Hence, the photograph showing the miserable condition of children inside cement pipes is a seven-year-old picture, taken in 2014 in Bangladesh and is not related to India.