Centre allows derogatory village name to be changed

The Centre has approved an Uttarakhand government proposal to drop the affix 'chamar' from the village named 'Pilkhichamar' in the state's Champawat district. It has also allowed the Madhya Pradesh government to rename the village 'Kunchi' near Satna to 'Chandangarh'.

The Uttarakhand government had made the proposal following demands from the locals, who wanted to drop the reference to a particular community in their village name, officials in the know said Friday.

As per the government guidelines for renaming villages, railway stations, towns or cities, states must get a no-objection certificate (NOC) from the union home ministry.


"The NOC is issued after seeking reports from field units of the Geographical Survey of India, Department of Post and the Ministry of Earth Sciences," said a home ministry official.

In the last five years, the home ministry had approved seven proposals to rename cities and towns. These included renaming of Uttar Pradesh's Allahabad, which was granted an NOC on December 15, 2018, to change its name to Prayagraj.

In 2021, the Madhya Pradesh government got clearance to change the name of Hoshangabad Nagar as 'Narmadapuram', Shivpuri as 'Kundeshwar Dham' and Babai as 'Makhan Nagar'. Babai was renamed after journalist and poet Makhanlal Chaturvedi. The ministry had earlier approved the renaming of the British-era Robertsgang railway station as Sonbhadra. The Farah Town railway station near Mathura and the iconic Mughalsarai junction were renamed after Pandit Deendayal Upadhyay, the founder of Bhartiya Jana Sangh.

While the renaming of a state requires amendment of the Constitution with a simple majority in Parliament, the name of a village or town can be amended through an executive order. The Mamata Banerjee government's proposal to change the name of West Bengal to 'Bangla' is stuck, as the proposed name sounded similar to the name of the neighbouring country Bangladesh, said an official.