Orissa is now Odisha

It refers to rightful renaming Orissa as Odisha as per actual Odia (earlier Oriya) pronunciation of name of the Indian state. Even after 63 years of independence British legacy of distorted names and spellings is continuing in free India. Union government should take urgent steps for a consolidated change of names and spellings of all its cities and states to be as per their actual pronunciation.

Beginning should be made with change of distorted spelling of country?s capital ?Delhi? to ?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.

According to an RTI response, Union government has not so far acted on long-pending unanimous resolution passed by West Bengal assembly on 20.07.1999 to rename West Bengal as Bangla. Otherwise also, it is senseless to name a state as West Bengal because erstwhile East Bengal is now Bangladesh. Rather it creates confusion because incidentally West-Bengal is in eastern part of the country! Otherwise also, names of states should also be changed to make them one-worded like Karnatak, Maharashtra etc so that distortion by abbreviation may not be possible as has been like UP for Uttar Pradesh.

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.