Old video from India shared to claim child rescued in Nepal flood
A video recently posted on Facebook claims that a child was rescued alive three days after the flood in Nepal. However, Dismislab’s fact-check found that the circulated video is not from the recent rescue operation in Nepal but from an older incident in India.
The video was posted from a personal Facebook profile on August 31, with the caption, “Child rescued alive three days after destruction in Nepal.” The 26-second video shows a child trapped inside a hole being given juice to drink. The following part shows rescue workers and people from the surrounding area together bringing the child out of that space.
By the time of this report’s publication, the video had been viewed more than 332,000 times and shared more than 550 times. Users have reacted to the post more than 18,000 times.
The video was seen posted with the same claim from multiple Facebook profiles (1, 2, 3) and a page.
To verify the authenticity, a reverse image search was conducted using keyframes from the video. This led to a video posted from a Facebook profile on May 17, 2026, which matched the circulated video. Part of the caption reads, “A 4-year-old child who accidentally fell into an open borewell in Chak Samana village of Hoshiarpur was rescued safely after a massive 9-hour operation.”
Following the lead of the video, Dismislab conducted further verification of the incident using relevant keyword searches. Reports published on the incident by multiple Indian news outlets (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) were found. These reports reveal that on May 15, 2026, in Hoshiarpur, Punjab, a 4-year-old child named Gurkaran Singh fell into a deep borewell hole dug near his house while playing.
After a prolonged rescue operation lasting nearly nine hours, the child was safely rescued. It is learned that although Gurkaran’s face was covered in mud, he was completely fine.
In other words, the video circulated with the claim of rescuing a child following the destruction in Nepal is, in fact, footage of a rescue operation in Punjab, India, in May.
Notably, on August 28, a 6-year-old child named Manisha was rescued alive from under rubble two days after the flood in Nepal.
All social media captions, quotations, and news excerpts in this article have been translated into English from the languages in which they were originally posted or published.
