Fact Check: CM Yogi Adityanath has not announced lockdown in 15 districts of UP
A video of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath announcing lockdown in 15 districts has been doing the rounds..
By Satya Priya BN Published on 19 March 2021 8:01 PM IST
Hyderabad: A video of Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath announcing lockdown in 15 districts has been doing the rounds of Facebook.
The video started circulating after Prime Minister Narendra Modi met the Chief Ministers of all the states following the rise in the number of COVID-19 cases.
In the video, CM Adityanath mentions the names of the 15 districts that will be under lockdown and states the safety measures taken by the government. He also instructs the residents of the districts to avoid public gatherings and to stay indoors. The authorities will monitor the situation closely, he adds.
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Fact Check:
The claim that the UP CM recently announced lockdown in 15 districts of the state is FALSE.
States like Maharashtra, Punjab, Gujarat, Kerala, and Delhi have been reporting a daily rise in the number of COVID-19 cases for the past few days and may impose night curfew in some of the districts. Some districts of Maharashtra like Nagpur are already under lockdown.
NewsMeter searched for reports regarding a lockdown in Uttar Pradesh and did not find any. We extracted keyframes from the video and searched online and found that the video is from last year. Several videos were published on 22 March 2020 on various news media platforms after a nationwide lockdown was announced.
Following the announcement of the Janata Curfew in 2020, the Uttar Pradesh government had put a total of 15 districts under lockdown in the wake of the rising novel coronavirus cases in the state. The decision was announced by Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath. The 15 districts included Noida, Ghaziabad, Agra, Prayagraj, Kanpur, Varanasi, Bareilly, Lucknow, Saharanpur, Meerut, Lakhimpur, and Azamgarh.
Hence, this video is from March 2020 when the first phase of the lockdown was imposed after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. It is not recent and the claim is FALSE.
