This Photo Is Not Of The Puttalam - Anuradhapura Highway. Here’s The Truth...

Sri Lanka’s national highways have been rapidly developing since the end of the country’s 26 year long civil war in 2009 with the help of several funders including the World Bank and Asian Development Bank. The new and reconstructed roads have helped improve livelihoods and lower the cost and time of transporting goods to several parts of the country.

In this context, we noticed an old photo posted on Facebook getting new attention. Initially posted by a page called Matiya, on 4th October 2017, the image is of a pristine road and it is claimed to be of the Puttalam-Anuradhapura Highway. Receiving nearly 7000 likes and over 28,000 shares to date, the post is accompanied with the text “මේ වෙන රටක නෙමෙයි මචං අපේ රටේ පුත්තලම අනුරාධපුර ප්‍රධාන මර්ගය.. ලස්සනයි නේද.. ❤️” translating to English as “This is not from another country dude, this is our country’s Puttalam-Anuradhapura main road. Isn’t it beautiful?” The post can be seen below:

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A keyword search also revealed the post was shared recently causing renewed attention for the image as can be seen below

The old post seems to have also received new comments as can be seen in the comments section:

Considering the generic aspects of the image that could imply that it was taken anywhere in the world it was necessary to do a fact check to ascertain its authenticity.

FACT CHECK

We began our search with a simple Google Reverse Image Search which indicated that the road was in fact an image from a road on Kangaroo Island, Adelaide, Australia. Our search results can be seen below with a series of similar images of the same highway, each associating the image with the highway in South Australia:

Looking specifically at stock images from sites like Twenty20.com, ageofstock.com, imgur.com , alamy.com indicated the image location as “The road to Cape du Couedic, Flinders Chase National Park, Kangaroo Island, South Australia”

View post on imgur.com

Further, a Daily Mail article published on 7th January 2020 indicated that the pristine road and surroundings were no more, as a result of the devastating forest fires that rocked the country for several months. Several before and after photos, show the same road which is now in a terrible condition as can be seen from one of the photographs in the Daily Mail article as can be seen below:

The Daily Mail also published a before and after composite image of the road as can be seen below:

Additionally, we looked for images of the actual Puttalam- Anuradhapura road in Sri Lanka. It was discovered that the actual highway does not end in Anuradhapura but continues on to Trincomalee and hence the AA012 is actually known as the Puttalam - Trincomalee Road according to the Road Development Authority in Sri Lanka. Some images of the highway from our Google Search can be seen below:

CONCLUSION

Based on our investigation which indicates that the image was taken in South Australia and not Sri Lanka, hence we declare the viral post is false and miscaptioned. While Sri Lanka’s roads have been expanding and developing rapidly, this image is not from Sri Lanka and represents an old photo of the road to Cape du Couedic, Flinders Chase National Park, Kangaroo Island, South Australia