Fact Check: Is this elephant walking through Dehradun street amid lockdown? Here’s the truth

The video is not captured during the recent ongoing nationwide lockdown.

A video of an elephant taking a stroll through a street in Dehradun is a beautiful sight that may lift up your spirits. The clip, however, is being shared with a false claim that it’s captured during the recent ongoing nationwide lockdown.

The image shows the elephant wandering around. (Screengrab)

While several wild animals have reclaimed the streets of locked down towns - be it a peacock dancing in Mumbai or a Nilgai wandering around in Noida, this video of the jumbo isn’t among them. It is at least a few months old.

“Elephant seen in Dehradun Jollygrant area. Amid this corona pandemic, Nature claiming its territory again,” wrote a Twitter user and shared the video online.

Here are some other tweets with the same video claiming that it’s an incident which took place recently during the lockdown.

A tweet shared by IFS officer Vaibhav Singh appears to be the first post with this video. “Next time you visit the suburbs of Dehradun and decide to go for a ride or morning stroll, be careful, just like the bike rider in the vid!!” he wrote. In the caption he also mentioned “Majri Grant,” which is a village in Doiwala Tehsil in Dehradun District of Uttarakhand. The caption also mentions November as the period when the clip was captured. Hence, it wasn’t captured during the recent lockdown.

We also found another YouTube video shared in November 2019 by a channel named Live Uttarakhand and it features the same viral clip.

So, the uplifting video of the elephant walking through a street is in Dehradun is an old incident and unrelated to the recent lockdown.