Former power minister Piyush Goyal was trolled for tweeting old NASA images of India
Union Minister Piyush Goyal is being trolled on Twitter for a post celebrating an important milestone for the Narendra Modi government -- the
electrification of all villages in the country, which was announced on Sunday. The former power minister tweeted two satellite images of India, taken at night, in what appeared to be a before-and-after scenario. But within hours, hundreds of Twitter users rushed to contradict him.
The images Mr Goyal tweeted were
genuine images of India released by US space agency NASA. The trouble is, they did not portray the situation before and after Saturday's electrification of Manipur's Leisang village. The US space agency had released the first photograph in 2012. The second was released last year but is from 2016 and aims to highlight the patterns of human settlement.
The images Mr Goyal used are
composite images showing how cities have grown and populations have spread in India.
Mr Goyal's tweet, which went viral with over 2,000 retweets in a couple of hours, did not mention NASA.
The backlash was not long in coming.
Last year, NASA released global composite maps of the Earth's "night lights". According to the US space agency, their team wrote code that picked the clearest night views each month, ultimately combining all the pictures to come up with the two images from 2012 and 2016. In 2017, NASA released the composite image from 2016 as well as a revised image from 2012.
Last year, NASA released this composite night-time view of India and surrounding areas from 2016
Last year, NASA released this composite night-time view of India and surrounding areas from 2012
Satirist Akash Banerjee pointed this fact out to the Railway and Coal Minister.
The minister is yet to respond to the controversy.
On Sunday morning, Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced that the mammoth task of bringing electricity to every Indian village was finally achieved. PM Modi tweeted that Leisang, a village in the Senapati district of Manipur, was the last to receive electricity on Saturday.
In 2015, during his Independence Day speech, PM Modi promised that in 1,000 days all villages where electricity was yet to reach, would have power.
A village is considered electrified if it has basic electrical infrastructure and 10 percent of its households and public places have electricity. This, of course, is not the same as every house being electrified.Click for more
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