An edited image of a petrol bill from Vikhroli, Mumbai, is making rounds on social media. The image asks to not vote for PM Modi. An image of a petrol bill is purportedly by an ‘HPL’ dealer named Sai Balaji Petroleum in Mumbai’s Vikhroli is viral on social media. The text along with the image asks readers to not vote for Prime Minister Narendra Modi the next time if they want reduced petrol prices.
The retail price of petrol and diesel has been skyrocketing for the last several days in the country. This has led to demonstrations against the Modi government in several parts of the country by opposition parties.
The text along with one of these viral images reads “If you want to reduce the petrol price don’t vote for Modi again”.
After doing a thorough check, on the petrol pump’s exact address, we discovered that there is no such petrol pump named after Sai Balaji Petroleum by HPL dealer in Vikhroli, West Mumbai. India has a petroleum company named Hindustan Petroleum Corporation Limited, which is HPCL and not HPL. In 2018, HPCL had tweeted about the same dismissing the claim. HPCL also took to Twitter to clear out the air about these claims. The tweet included a comparison between their original bill and the edited bill, saying, “Bill in question is a fake bill which has nothing to do with HPCL. The fake bill has a Company name given as “HPL” and has been floating in digital medium since long, with malafide intentions. Real bill format by HPCL is attached for reference.”
On observing the bill, there can be seen a lot of discrepancies on it. The size of the font of the date, time and bill number does not match precisely. The faults Different-sized fonts used in the date ’04/10/2018′ and the time ‘10:17’
In the bill number, the numbers ‘1345’ have a thicker font than the 0s.
The amount ‘87.88’ is also seen in different fonts and shades at different places in the bill.
Lastly, the controversial sentence printed at the bottom has a different font and its alignment is also not in place. In fact, the fake image of the petrol bill was created from a sample template available to manufacturers/suppliers/traders of POS billing machines.
Hence, it is clear that the bill in question is fake and the text against voting for PM Modi is edited into a sample bill available online.
