Govt of India ministry uses Canadian, US road pix to show how nice Indian highways built under Modi are: Alt News

By A Representative
In a second major exposure, well-known fact-check site, Alt News, has found that the Ministry of Roads, Transport and Highways, Government of India, has used two photographs from Canada and US to showcase how good India's roads are. Alt News did this on checking a Tweet by Khalid Hussain (@khalidmfp) who said that the ministry website used the photograph of Gardiner Expressway, Toronto, Canada, "fooling 1.3 billion Indians".
Using internet tools, Alt News, run by Pratik Sinha, a Gujarat-based human rights campaigner, who also happens to be a software engineering, said, as the picture shared by the Twitter user seemed to be of the "same road as seen from the similar background" but was "not identical to the picture used on the ministry website", it was verified using "street view feature of Google Maps", and found that the allegation was true.

"Yes, it is indeed the Gardiner expressway that the Ministry of Roads, Transport and Highways has used on the website", Alt News said, adding, a YouTube video of Gardiner expressway further confirmed that "the imagery used by the Transport Ministry website is actually from Toronto Canada."
Not stopping here, Alt News looked at more photographs of the ministry website, and it found that another photograph is had used "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."

Nicola, says altnews.in, 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.”
Commented Alt News: ministry 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?"

Four months ago, Alt News created a major flutter around how the Union Ministry Home Affairs (MHA) annual report used the picture of Spain-Morocco border to show Indian border floodlighting.
"Spain and Morocco have a sea between them but there are Spanish conclaves on the north coast of Africa that have a fenced and floodlit border with Morocco. The picture was taken in 2006 by a Spanish photographer, Javier Moyano", it said.
According to Alt News, "As per MHA, floodlighting of the border started in 2003. The MHA annual report of 2013-14 states that 'the entire stretch of the Indo-Pakistan border has been completed except for a small part of pending work in the Gujarat sector of Indo-Pak border'. While the India-Pakistan border was nearly fully floodlit in 2013, only 1763 km out of the sanctioned 2840 km (62%) of the India-Bangladesh border was floodlit at the end of 2013."

Alt News further said, "Out of the 647 km floodlit in the three years by Modi Sarkar, around 45 km was on the India -Pakistan border and the balance was on the India-Bangladesh border. Around 496 km of the sanctioned length of India-Bangladesh border still remains to be floodlit."
It added, The fact that floodlighting of the India-Pakistan border was nearly complete even by 2011 can also be seen from the ... photograph of the border by NASA. Around 1,861 km of the border had already been floodlit when the picture was taken."

Comments

Was Netaji forced to alter face, die in obscurity in USSR in 1975? Was he so meek?

By Rajiv Shah This should sound almost hilarious. Not only did Subhas Chandra Bose not die in a plane crash in Taipei, nor was he the mysterious Gumnami Baba who reportedly passed away on 16 September 1985 in Ayodhya, but we are now told that he actually died in 1975—date unknown—“in oblivion” somewhere in the former Soviet Union. Which city? Moscow? No one seems to know.

Swami Vivekananda's views on caste and sexuality were 'painfully' regressive

By Bhaskar Sur* Swami Vivekananda now belongs more to the modern Hindu mythology than reality. It makes a daunting job to discover the real human being who knew unemployment, humiliation of losing a teaching job for 'incompetence', longed in vain for the bliss of a happy conjugal life only to suffer the consequent frustration.

Love letters in a lifelong war: Babusha Kohli’s resistance in verse

By Ravi Ranjan* “War does not determine who is right—only who is left.” Bertrand Russell’s words echo hauntingly in our times, and few contemporary Hindi poets embody this truth as profoundly as Babusha Kohli. Emerging from Jabalpur, Madhya Pradesh, Kohli has carved a unique space in literature by weaving together tenderness, protest, and philosophy across poetry, prose, and cinema. Her work is not merely artistic expression—it is resistance, refuge, and a call for peace.

Buddhist shrines were 'massively destroyed' by Brahmanical rulers: Historian DN Jha

Nalanda mahavihara By Rajiv Shah Prominent historian DN Jha, an expert in India's ancient and medieval past, in his new book , "Against the Grain: Notes on Identity, Intolerance and History", in a sharp critique of "Hindutva ideologues", who look at the ancient period of Indian history as "a golden age marked by social harmony, devoid of any religious violence", has said, "Demolition and desecration of rival religious establishments, and the appropriation of their idols, was not uncommon in India before the advent of Islam".

Asbestos contamination in children’s products highlights global oversight gaps

By A Representative A commentary published by the International Ban Asbestos Secretariat (IBAS) has drawn attention to the challenges governments face in responding effectively to global public-health risks. In an article written by Laurie Kazan-Allen and published on March 5, 2026, the author examines how the discovery of asbestos contamination in children’s play products has raised questions about regulatory oversight and international product safety. The article opens by reflecting on lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic, noting that governments in several countries were slow to respond to early warning signs of the crisis. Referring to the experience of the United Kingdom, the author writes that delays in implementing protective measures contributed to “232,112 recorded deaths and over a million people suffering from long Covid.” The commentary uses this example to illustrate what it describes as the dangers of underestimating emerging threats. Attention then turns...

India’s green energy push faces talent crunch amidst record growth at 16% CAGR

By Jag Jivan* A new study by a top consulting firm has found that India’s cleantech sector is entering a decisive growth phase, with strong policy backing, record capacity additions and surging investor interest, but facing mounting pressure on talent supply and rising compensation costs .

The kitchen as prison: A feminist elegy for domestic slavery

By Garima Srivastava* Kumar Ambuj stands as one of the most incisive voices in contemporary Hindi poetry. His work, stripped of ornamentation, speaks directly to the lived realities of India’s marginalized—women, the rural poor, and those crushed under invisible forms of violence. His celebrated poem “Women Who Cook” (Khānā Banātī Striyāṃ) is not merely about food preparation; it is a searing indictment of patriarchal domestic structures that reduce women’s existence to endless, unpaid labour.

The price of silence: Why Modi won’t follow Shastri, appeal for sacrifice

By Arundhati Dhuru, Sandeep Pandey* In 1965, as India grappled with war and a crippling food crisis, Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri faced a United States that used wheat shipments under the PL-480 agreement as a lever to dictate Indian foreign policy. Shastri’s response remains legendary: he appealed to the nation to skip one meal a day. Millions of middle-class households complied, choosing temporary hunger over the sacrifice of national dignity. Today, India faces a modern equivalent in the energy sector, yet the leadership’s response stands in stark contrast to that era of self-reliance.

Beyond sattvik: Purity, caste and the politics of the Indian kitchen

By Rajiv Shah A few week ago, I was forwarded an article that appeared in the British weekly The Economist . Titled “Caste and cuisine: From honeycomb curry to blood fry: India’s ‘untouchable’ cooking”, it took me back to what I had blogged about what was called a “ sattvik food festival”, an annual event organised by former Indian Institute of Management-Ahmedabad professor Anil Gupta.

Search This Blog