The Ministry of Roads, Transport and Highways is using images of roads in Canada and Unites States passing it off as Indian road on its Parivahan website.
The image used in the ministry website is Gardiner expressway from Toronto, Canada. Though, a reverse image search does not lead to the original source, the alt news , a fact checking website, verified the image using street view feature of Google maps.
https://parivahan.gov.in/screengrab
Moreover, a YouTube video of Gardiner expressway further confirms that the imagery used by the Transport Ministry website is actually from Toronto Canada.
YouTube screen grab
The alt news report also said that another image used by the ministry website is of Kyle Canyon Road in Nevada, US.
https://parivahan.gov.in/sarathiservice12/sarathiHomePublic.do
The photograph was taken by Nicola on June 23, 2011, which he posted on his Flickr account.
flickr.com
This is not the first time the government has been caught on the wrong foot
In June, the ministry of Home Affairs published an image of the Spain-Morocco border in its annual report passing it off as floodlighting done along the India’s borders in Jammu and Kashmir.
A couple of months later, then power minister Piyush Goyal shared an 8 year old image of streets in Russia to showcase LED street lighting in India. However, when social media users called out the bluff, he replaced the tweet with an image of the Indian streets. In April, Union Minister Babul Supriyo was left red-faced after he tweeted a representational photo of a bus stop in Rajkot that was yet to be built in the city . However, the leader soon realised the goof up that he had made. “The world-class bus stand” image that he had shared was just, in fact, an artiste’s impression.
It’s a telling situation that the union government, which has to be the most reliable source of information, has been repeatedly caught on the wrong foot. If our ministers and government bodies share wrong info , it inevitably gets a stamp of authentication.
