It refers to Haryana government rightly correcting distorted name of the town Ballabgarh to its logical name Balramgarh. Earlier also many states have corrected name and/or spellings of their cities and even of states themselves in logical manner and/or according to actual pronunciation. There are many such example like Jalandhar, Shimla, Benguluru etc. But such change of names/spellings is continuing to be done in a slow and gradual manner even despite till after seven decades of independence when most of distorted names/spellings of Indian cities/states were given by erstwhile British rulers in India.
Central government should study names/spellings of all Indian states and cities, and in one go should change name/spelling of the distorted names. Spellings of cities like Bareilly, Meerut and even capital city of India Delhi still remain to be changed. Distorted spelling of country’s capital ‘Delhi’ should also be rectified as ‘Dehli’ which means ‘entrance’. Already neighbouring countries like China and Bangladesh have changed spellings of their capital cities from earlier Peking and Dacca to Beijing and Dhaka respectively.
Students and others born much after India got independence are often confused why a state in eastern part of the country is named as ‘West Bengal’. Only old-timers know that since western part of pre-independence undivided Bengal came to India, the state was named as ‘West Bengal’, and ‘East Bengal’ turned into East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). To remove unnecessary confusion from minds of students and others, prefix ‘West’ should be removed from name of the state. Even name ‘Pashchimbanga’ suggested by the state-government is not correct because again it has Hindi pre-fix ‘Pashchim’ in the suggested name. To avoid abbreviations like UP for Uttar Pradesh, MP for Madhya Pradesh etc, states should be named in single word.
Union Government should also adopt single name ‘Bharat’ for the country abolishing British given name as India, in tune with unanimous resolution once passed by UP state-assembly. Otherwise also it is senseless to have two names for a country. Countries like Shrilanka and Myanmar have already done away with such British legacy when these countries are no more known as Ceylon and Burma.
MADHU AGRAWAL