A Union government website has done it again. Close to the heels of using an image of the Spain-Morocco border to represent lighting along the Indian border, comes another blooper. Even with India having a massive road network of 5.4 million kilometres, the Ministry of Roads, Transport and Highways could not find a picture of an Indian road to use on its parivahan website.
The image used in the ministry website is of the Gardiner expressway from Toronto, Canada. Even though a reverse image search does not lead to this picture, users familiar with the Canadian expressway were surprised to spot it on a Government of India website.
After using the Morocco-Spain border picture, now The Ministry of Road Transport & Highway Govt. of India used the picture of Gardiner Expressway, Toronto, Canada in their website.
Kudos to BJP Govt. for fooling 1.3 billion indians.
.https://t.co/cAUqOIF4zX pic.twitter.com/cnEqCD7vOx— Khalid Hussain (@khalidmfp) November 10, 2017
The picture shared by the Twitter users seems to be of the same road as seen from the similar background but it is not identical to the picture used on the ministry website. Alt News tried to verify if it was a picture of the same expressway by using the street view feature of Google Maps. And yes, it is indeed the Gardiner expressway that the Ministry of Roads, Transport and Highways has used on the website
Additionally, a YouTube video of Gardiner expressway further confirms that the imagery used by the Transport Ministry website is actually from Toronto Canada.
On cue, we decided to look up other images that are being used on the Transport Ministry website. It turns out that Gardiner expressway is not the only picture that has been adopted by them.
The picture above that has been used on the Ministry website is of Kyle Canyon Road in Nevada, US. The photograph was taken by Nicola on June 23, 2011, which he posted on his Flickr account. He has described the image as, “State Route 157 (SR 157), also known as Kyle Canyon Road, is a state highway in Clark County, Nevada. The highway connects the Las Vegas area to the recreational areas of Mount Charleston in the Spring Mountains.”
The ‘Parivahan’ website is designed, developed and hosted by National Informatics Center (NIC). A Government of India institution, NIC prides itself as the “prime builder” of e-governance applications. Is it too much to ask them not to use images from other countries as representative of India?
In recent times, there have been several such instances where government websites and publications have used pictures from other countries as representative of progress in India. With so much to showcase in India, what is the need to look to other countries for images that can be passed off as Indian?
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