Fact check: Video of children crossing river to reach school is not from India

The viral video of children crossing the river to reach school is not from India. The video instead is from Kumpur village in Nepal. Viral claims are misleading.

Misleading claim about schools in India
Screenshot of video clip featuring Nepal school students being widely shared as video from India. (PC: X)

Lighthouse Journalism came across a video being shared widely. The video featured school kids crossing a river in a carriage hooked to a wire. While some kids sit in a carriage, other kids are pushing it from the top. In the post it is being claimed, that the amount of efforts the government is putting in Kanwar Yatra, if only they could have put the same efforts in making roads for these children. During the investigation we found that the video is not from India but from Nepal.

Claim:

X user Inderjeet Barak shared the video on his profile.

Check the archive version of the post here.

Other users too are sharing the same video with same claim.

Investigation:

We started the investigation by running a reverse image search on the keyframes obtained from the videos.

We also found a watermark on the short video that said, ‘@FreeDocumentary’.

During the reverse image search, we found the video on the Instagram profile Infomance.

The video posted on June 11 had a text on it that said, ‘The daily struggle of Nepal school students’.

During the investigation we also found a website that mentioned that the video was titled, ‘Most Dangerous Ways to School – Nepal Cultural Documentary‘.

We then searched the video on YouTube with the keyword search.

We found the video posted on the YouTube channel of ‘Free Documentary’, the watermark that we noticed on the viral video.

The video was uploaded on 6 September, 2015.
The title of the video said: Most Dangerous Ways To School | NEPAL | Free Documentary

The description mentioned that the video was from mountain village of Kumpur. The village community Kumpur is spread across 18 farms on the Dhap Mountain. Their families live in a very remote area.

At around 22.44 mins the exact visuals from the viral video can be seen in this documentary. The narrator narrates that the basket stops once it reaches in the middle of the river, then the other three students, push the basket.

Conclusion: The viral video of children crossing the river to reach school is not from India. The video instead is from Kumpur village in Nepal. Viral claims are misleading.