A promotional video of the Noida International Airport tweeted on Friday by several Bharatiya Janata Party leaders, including Cabinet ministers, used an image of an airport in Beijing, fact checkers found out.
The video, bearing a watermark of the government’s citizen engagement platform MyGov, was also tweeted from its official handle, ‘MyGovHindi’. However, it was deleted on Friday morning after fact checkers pointed out the faux pas.
On Friday, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had laid the foundation stone of the airport, located in Greater Noida’s Jewar area in western Uttar Pradesh.
Mohammed Zubair, co-founder of fact-checking website AltNews, pointed out that the distinct starfish design showed in a graphical representation of the Noida Airport, was that of the Daxing International Airport in the Chinese capital.
Zubair shared a video, originally tweeted by BloombergQuint, after the airport in Beijing was inaugurated in 2019.
The photo used in the video tweeted by BJP leaders is also available on the Daxing Airport’s website, and The Guardian had also used the photo in an article in 2019.
India Today’s fact-checking team found that similar photos of the airport in Beijing had been published by Getty Images.
The Noida airport, spread over more than 1,300 hectares, will be Asia’s biggest, Civil Aviation Minister Jyotiraditya Scindia had said on Wednesday, according to ANI. It will have a capacity to serve around 1.2 crore passengers in a year.
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