Why naming West Bengal as Paschimbanga?

This year while making some students preparing for their annual examinations, a student made a curious enquiry why a state in eastern part of the country is named as ‘West Bengal’. Even I was not prepared for the curious question, and I had to seek explanation from my husband who clarified 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 people, at least prefix ‘West’ should be removed from name of the state knowing it simply by name of ‘Bengal’ or ‘Bang-Pradesh’. It is unfortunate that state-government is now recommending name of state as ‘Paschimbanga’ which will in no way eliminate the big confusion.

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. Though spellings of many other cities like Jalandhar, Shimla are already changed, Bareilly and Meerut still remain to be re-spelt. 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.