Fact Check: Water highway video shared by Norwegian diplomat is from China, NOT India
The tweet goes: “Incredible India! I finally encountered the most beautiful water highway”
A video of vehicles crossing a road submerged in water was shared through the Twitter handle of Erik Solhiem, a Norwegian diplomat and former politician. He shared the video with the claim that it shows the water highway in India.
The tweet goes: "Incredible India! I finally encountered the most beautiful water highway"
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Fact check:
The claim that the video shows a water highway in India is FALSE. The video shows the Yongxiu-Wucheng road in China.
When the keyframes extracted from the video were searched using Google Reverse image search, we found the same video was shared along with the same music on reddit.
The video was shared with the title "This flooded highway in Yongxiu Wucheng, with Spirited Away vibes" in July 2022.
We also found another Facebook post and a tweet by People's Daily of China with the title "Take a drive on "road underwater" in E China's Jiangxi! A section of Yongxiu-Wucheng Road is submerged in water during flood season when the water-level exceeds 18.67 meters #AmazingChina"
Taking the cue from this post, we added the keywords "Yongxiu wucheng" to the search, and found several articles from China that mentioned about Dahuchi section of Yonxiu-Wucheng road.
According to an article in dangerousroads.org, this road was built across the Poyang lake which is flooded almost every year. It is one of the periodically flooded roads around the world. It is 29.9 km (18.57 miles) long and with the onset of rainy season, water-level in the lake swells by the end of May, every year.
For the next few months, this road is deep under the water. As the water-level of the lake rises, the road is gradually flooded. Although drivers can no longer see the road surface, they still drive across the road by keeping within the guard rails erected on either side. As the water-level continues to rise, after a few days, the entire road is completely submerged. Eventually, a few months later, the road reappears again.
In 2019, a series of photographs were also published in several publications showing the submerged section of the road.
http://www.china.org.cn/
According to cgtn.com, the water-level in Poyang lake reaches 18.67 meters in June and July every year, causing inundation of a portion of the Yongxiu-Wucheng Road. It creates the scene of an "underwater highway."
Therefore, the submerged road seen in the video is not from India, it is the Yongxiu-Wucheng road in China which is built on Poyang lake and is submerged for a few months every year due to the flooding of the Poyang lake.