FAKE ALERT: Congress passes off old, unrelated images as that of Bihar floods

CLAIM

The official Twitter handle of Bihar Congress (INC Bihar) posted two images in separate tweets to attack Nitish Kumar government over the flood situation in the state.

Accusing Bihar government for mishandling the flood situation, Congress tweeted that 11 districts in Bihar with around 25 lakh population are affected by floods.

The tweet had an image showing a flood-ravaged village.

In another tweet, Congress took a dig at Kumar and said that instead of turning Muzaffarpur, Bihar Sharif and Bhagalpur into smart cities, he has turned them into floating-cities.

This tweet has a photo in which a woman wades through a flooded street.

TRUTH
Both the images are old and not related to the ongoing flood situation in Bihar.

VERIFICATION AND METHODOLOGY
We cropped the relevant portion of both the images and performed a reverse-image search on them to get to their source.

Tweet/Image 1

We found the exact same image on Shutterstock. It was clicked in 2013

The image is captioned as ‘Houses of Raxaul, a poor Indian town in Bihar state, India, circa November 2013. Bihar is one of the poorest states in India. The per capita income is about 300 dollars.’

Tweet/Image 2

On closely observing, we found a car with a West Bengal name plate. Taking a cue from this and using relevant keywords, we performed a reverse-image search and found the same photo in image stock website Alamy.

The image is captioned as ‘Flooded city road with vehicles, pedestrians and uprooted trees after severe cyclonic storm "Amphan" strike at West Bengal, India’ and credited to Roop Dey / Alamy Stock Photo.

VERDICT
Times Fact Check has found that old, unrelated images were posted by Congress to falsely claim that they were taken during the ongoing flood situation in Bihar.