New Delhi, June 14: A glittering picture of an awe inspiring landscape – what looks like a brightly lit frontier area – appears in the Union Home Ministry’s new annual reports border floodlighting chapter. But this image is from the Spain-Morocco border over 7,100 km away, clicked by a Spanish photographer.
The latest in the series of government bloopers appears on Page 40 of the Home Ministry’s 2016-17 annual report, boasting of how the government had completed floodlighting of nearly 1,944 km of the sanctioned 2,044 km along the International Border in Jammu and Kashmir, Punjab, Rajasthan and Gujarat.
The floodlighting of the borders is aimed at curbing infiltration attempts and cross-border crimes, it said.
The project has been completed in Punjab, Rajasthan and Jammu where lights have been installed along the 495 km, 1,022 km and 186 km stretches respectively. The pending 100-km stretch is in Gujarat where restoration work on a damaged floodlight area is underway.
The details are followed by the brightly yellow-lit picture is captioned: “Floodlighting along the Border,” of a long stretch of road that ends at a sea shore, making one wonder where is the sea shore in Punjab, Rajasthan or Jammu and Kashmir.
Perhaps in Gujarat
But then the landscape doesn’t look like an Indian border and the caption also doesn’t specify where and when the picture was taken. There is no credit for the photographer who had clicked it or any website where it had been downloaded from.
The bloomer was first reported by an online media platform “Alt News” that tracks fake news circulated on social media networks and other media platforms.