On a recent visit to Tamil Nadu during Indo-China Informal Summit, Prime Minister Narendra Modi shared few pictures on social media where he can be seen picking litter from the beautiful Mamallapuram Beach and collecting it in a bag. In his post, PM Modi urges people to keep the public places clean. 

As soon as PM Modi’s pictures from Mamallapuram Beach were posted on social media, many people started sharing random pictures online along with PM Modi’s picture, claiming them to be a picture of a ‘crew’, which is hired to shoot PM’s cleaning drill.

Karti Chidambaram, son of former union minister P Chidambaram took a dig at PM Modi’s plogging sharing few pictures on Twitter with a caption “Jai Shree Ram.”

Following Karti’s tweet, another congress leader Brijesh Kallapa shared the same image with a caption, "This is one section of the 25 member crew that shot PM Modi cleaning the five-star beach this morning. Good job guys.

A Twitter handle Rofl Republic (@i_theindian) also shared a set of images to suggest that Modi’s beach plogging exercise was a staged.

To know if the “crew” was actually hired to shoot PM Modi’s plogging, we began our investigation.

Our Investigation: Old and Random pictures

First Image

Upon investigation, we came across a website tayscreen.com where the image of ‘crew’ members on a beach was shared. Tayscreen.com is a website that provides assistance in media production.

Second Image

In another image that was widely shared on social media, some men can be seen performing security checks. This image was used in an article by ‘The Hindu’ which was shared on April 2019 during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to Kozhikode. The article informed about the tight-security status of the city amid PM’s visit.

Therefore it can be concluded that pictures doing rounds on social media along with PM Modi’s Mallapuram pictures are shared to spread misinformation that a crew is hired to shoot pictures for Prime Minister and the entire exercise was staged.