CLAIMThe official social media profiles of
Congress put out a graphic card to attack the BJP government on economic issues in India. The graphic had an image of a poor young boy working in what appeared to be a brick factory.
The text superimposed on this image had Congress claiming that over seven crore kids were under financial duress due to the impact Covid-19 is having on Indian economy. The grand old party further claimed that lakhs and crores of children are unable to go to school, rendering them illiterate.
A loose translation of the text in Hindi accompanying the graphic card reads, “Because of Covid-19 and BJP, Indian economy and its population is in severe economic distress. The
Modi government should soon take some steps to take India out of poverty.”
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TRUTHImage used by Congress to make these claims is from
Bangladesh
. It was clicked in January 2008.
VERIFICATION AND METHODOLOGYUsing reverse-image search, we found the same image in a photo gallery
published by website Zoriah on
child labour. All the photos in the gallery are credited to photo journalist GMB Akash.
The image in question is from a place called
Fatullah
in Bangladesh. It is captioned as “Children at a brick factory in Fatullah. For each 1,000 bricks they carry, they earn the equivalent of 0.9 USD.”
We traced the same photo on the official
website of GMB Akash.
We also
found the photo credited to GMB Akash on a UK stock image website Panos. It was taken in January, 2008 and captioned as “Children at a brick factory in Fatullah. For each thousand bricks they carry, they earn the equivalent of 0.9 USD. 17.5 percent of all children aged between 5-15 are engaged in economic activities. The average child labourer earns between 400 to 700 taka (1 USD = 70 taka) per month, while an adult worker earns up to 5,000 taka per month.”
VERDICTTimes Fact Check has found that Congress falsely passed off a photo from Bangladesh as that from India to attack BJP and the Modi government on economic issues.