Clip from Australia falsely linked to India sanitation woes
- Published on October 22, 2025 at 11:09
- Updated on October 22, 2025 at 11:25
- 2 min read
- By Sachin BAGHEL, AFP India
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Hygienic public washrooms are in short supply across India despite a building spree constructing millions of toilets as part of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's flagship "Clean India" programme. A video of a woman urinating in a lake has sparked outrage in the country after it was shared in posts that falsely claimed she was an American tourist in India's Udaipur city. The clip was in fact filmed in Western Australia.
"A white woman from the USA was caught urinating in a lake in Udaipur," reads in part a Hindi-language X post shared on October 11, 2025. Text overlaid on the video repeats the claim.
The widely shared video shows a woman steadying herself over the water on side of a vessel and urinating publicly in a lake. A crocodile can be seen swimming nearby.
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Similar posts were shared elsewhere on X and on Facebook, sparking outrage according to local media CNN News18, with some commenting the woman should be jailed and fined, while some said "imagine if an Indian did it abroad" (archived link).
"You have no toilets in India. What is she supposed to do?" another user commented, in an apparent reference to the country's sanitation challenges.
Despite Modi's flagship "Clean India" programme, experts said the lack of water or electricity meant many remain unused (archived link).
State governments have struggled to maintain public toilets, which are often poorly lit, unmanned, and reek of urine and faeces.
But the video was filmed in Western Australia, not India.
Google reverse image search on keyframes found a similar video posted on the Instagram account of Ellie-Jean Coffey -- an Australian surfer who used to compete professionally and the woman seen in the clip (archived here and here).
The video is captioned "I'm setting the record straight: im Australian: this is the Aussie outback: IT WAS NOT IN INDIA."
Text overlaid on the video reads, "Croc almost got me".
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The footage was initially posted on August 29, 2025 (archived link).
Another video from the same location, also posted on the same Instagram handle, includes the hashtag Kimberley (archived link).
The same clip was also posted on her TikTok account on August 29, 2025, with one of the comments saying it shows the Berkeley river (archived link).
A keyword search on YouTube found videos of the Casuarina Falls on Berkeley River in Western Australia's Kimberley showing matching features (archived here and here).
A photo distributed by AFP of the Berkeley River showed the similar terrain and rock formations.
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