The renaming process is one of the common things you might have heard these days pottering in Uttar Pradesh and some other states. After changing the names of Mughalsarai, Allahabad, and Faizabad in Uttar Pradesh, BJP is planning renaming of more such places associated with Mughal and Islamic rulers all over the country. This time it is Uttrakhand that is all set to change all its signboards in the railway station written in Urdu. These signboards will now be written in Sanskrit, the second official language of the hill state.
Replacing Urdu with Sanskrit
According to the sources, Railway officials have chosen to replace the Urdu language with Sanskrit on all signboards at platforms in Uttrakhand. The names of railway station signboards written in Hindi, English, and Urdu will now be written in Hindi, English, and Sanskrit.
The decision comes in as per requirements of the Railway Manual, which says that names of the railway stations should be written in Hindi, English and the second language of the state.
The ancient language Sanskrit was recognized as the second official language of Uttarakhand in 2010 during the chief ministership of Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, who is now Union HRD Minister.
A need for a change
The names on signboards still appear in Urdu as most of them belong to the days when the state was part of Uttar Pradesh where Urdu is the second official language. Since Sanskrit is the second language of Uttarakhand, the names of railway stations should be in Sanskrit too.
Because both the language (Hindi and Sanskrit) use a similar Devanagari script, Dehradun will now become Dehradunam, Haridwar will be Haridwaram and Roorkee will be Roorkeeh in Sanskrit.
The railway management has announced that the stations which will have Sanskrit names in Uttarakhand include Dehradun, Haridwar, Roorkee, Laksar, Raiwala, Doiwala, Rishikesh, among others.
