New Delhi, Jan 21 (PTI) A content creator’s photo was shared on social media with netizens claiming it to be of a 16-year-old JEE aspirant who recently committed suicide in Rajasthan’s Kota, a prominent hub for coaching institutes.
However, the PTI Fact Check Desk, during its investigation, found the claims to be false. The photo shared in the social media post was of a video content creator, Jyoti Thakur.
Thakur also posted a video on social media denying the claim.
The users shared the post two days after media reports surfaced about 16-year-old JEE aspirant Manan Jain who allegedly hanged himself at his grandparents’ house in Kota’s Bundi on the intervening night of January 17 and 18. This marked the fourth such incident in the coaching hub this year.
The viral post has garnered over 397K views so far.
The Desk ran the image through Google Lens and found that several other users had shared it across social media platforms with the same claim. On further scanning the search results, we found that the same photo was shared from an Instagram handle with the username Jyoti Thakur.
Apart from the same photo, the Desk noticed that Jyoti had posted her latest Instagram post on the night of January 20 (till the time of writing this article), whereas the claim was shared on social media on January 19, thereby making it false.
In the next part of the investigation, the Desk conducted a customised keyword search on Google about the recent suicide incident in Kota and came across a Hindustan Times report published on January 18.
According to the report, the deceased, who reportedly ended his life is a 16-year-old male student hailing from Bundi. While the viral post purportedly claims the deceased to be a female.
Further, to corroborate the details about if any female student identified as Kriti Tripathi had died of suicide in Kota, the Desk again conducted a customised keyword search on Google and came across a report by Hindustan Times dated May 10, 2016.
According to the report, Kriti committed suicide after jumping from a five-storey building in Kota on April 28, 2016. She also left a suicide note behind, wherein she urged the Government of India and the Human Resource Development (HRD) Ministry to shut coaching institutes as soon as possible.
Moreover, during the investigation, the Desk also came across a video posted by Thakur on her X handle. In the video, she vehemently rejected her association with the viral claim and stated that she has never ever been to Kota and is a native of Himachal Pradesh.
Hence, our investigation made it clear that Jyoti Thakur, a content creator, was falsely identified as Kriti Tripathi, a 17-year-old student who died by suicide in 2016. Read the full fact-check report here: https://bit.ly/42gTawV For verification or fact-checking of any claim circulating on social media, you can contact the PTI Fact Check Desk via WhatsApp at +91-8130503759. PTI TEAM NB NB
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