NEW DELHI: The Prime Minister’s Office has asked for an explanation from officials, following criticism on alleged alteration of the image of Narendra Modi surveying the flood situation in Chennai , at the information and broadcasting ministry and the Press Information Bureau.The PMO has also told both the ministry and the government’s media department that only pictures notified “real” — meaning those that have not been altered or significantly edited — should be released by them henceforth, a step aimed at avoiding such incidents in future.“We are trying to set accountability on who is responsible for this. Officials have been asked to doubly check if the pictures have been tampered with before releasing pictures to media. This should not happen again,” a top government official said.The altered image was released by the PIB on Thursday. It showed houses and water clearer than what were visible in the original image. The picture was removed subsequently, and PIB apologised for it, saying it was created by merging two photos. Officials said merging of pictures was a practice used commonly in the past as well.“We have seen the pictures of photo division during the aerial surveys of former PMs in the last many years. Several pictures, including those that include Manmohan Singh , were altered to include two pictures or to show a closer view of the ground, water level and the extent of destruction. This is only to give a more realistic view of the ground situation. To call it Photoshop (altering the photo by using the Photoshop editing software) is not right,” said an official.A meeting of all heads of media units of the government was held last week to find out what went wrong. Generally, the photo division in the I&B ministry sends pictures clicked by its photographers to the PIB, which selects the best and releases them to the media.