New Delhi: A glittering picture of an awe inspiring landscape — what looks like a brightly lit frontier area — appears in the Home Ministrys new annual reports border floodlighting chapter. But this image is from the Spain-Morocco border over 7,100km 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 1,944km of the sanctioned 2,044km 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 495km, 1,022km and 186km 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 — captioned: “Floodlighting along the Border” -- of a long stretch of road that ends at a sea shore. One wonders 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.
Digging a bit deeper and doing an image search on Google revealed that the picture is of the tiny border stretch between Morocco and Spain clicked in 2006 by Spanish photographer Javier Moyano.
Spain in Europe and Morroco in Africa are separated by the Strait of Gibraltar — a narrow strait that connects the Mediterranean Sea to the Atlantic Ocean.
This is not the first time that a blooper has been committed in the name of government achievements.
In 2015, the Press Information Bureau of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting shared a picture of Prime Minister Narendra Modi visiting flood-hit areas of Chennai.
The picture showed a seated Modi looking — through the circular windowpane of a chopper — at rooftops and submerged streets.
However, it appeared that the image was a Photoshopped version of an earlier snap which in fact showed Modi surveying a flood-hit area which had hazy exteriors and the submerged expanse of Chennai.
An embarrassed PIB promptly deleted the picture, but offered no explanation for the blooper.
