Narayana Swamy
Daijiworld Media Network
Mangalore, Feb 26 : Six years after the then chief minister of Karnataka Dharam Singh's proposal of changing the names of 12 major cities into pure Kannada forms, the time is nearing to change them officially.
Though some of the cities have already implemented the cities' names in Kannada, there was no compulsion from the government to follow the rule. According to reliable sources, the legal hurdles to go ahead with the proposal is almost cleared now and within a month 12 major cities of Karnataka will be renamed according to their Kannada roots.
This means, Bangalore will be renamed as 'Bengaluru', and Mangalore as 'Mangaluru'.
The Karnataka government is finalising the process, and the official gazette is awaited.
S V Ranganath, chief secretary of Karnataka government said that legal hurdles related to renaming 12 cities have been cleared, and only the opinion from Surveyor of India is awaited. The committee headed by S V Ranganath has submitted the report to Surveyor of India in order to make necessary changes in the map and survey documents.
It may be recalled that when the proposal was made in 2005 there had been opposition from a few corners, specially to changing the name of 'Bengaluru' and 'Belagavi'. Public Interest Litigations were filed in the high court to put a stay on announcing the change of names. But both applications were rejected by the high court in 2008. Later, even the central government approved the change of names, but the implementation was not possible due to technical reasons.
The old and new names of twelve cities are as follows:
Bangalore - Bengaluru
Mangalore - Mangaluru
Bellary - Ballary
Bijapur - Vijapura
Belgaum - Belagavi
Chikmaglur - Chikmagaluru
Gulbarga - Kalburgi
Mysore - Mysoru
Hospet - Hospete
Shimoga - Shivamogga
Hubli - Hubballi
Tumkur - Tumakuru