Urdu out, Uttarakhand rail signboards to show place names twice in Devanagari script

Dehradun: Names of railway stations written in Urdu on platform signboards in Uttarakhand will now be written in Sanskrit, the second official language of the hill state.

Northern Railway Chief Public Relations Officer Deepak Kumar said the move is in keeping with the Railway Manual which says the name of a railway station on platform signboards should be written in the second official language of the state concerned after Hindi and English. "Instead of Hindi, English and Urdu, the names of railway stations on platform signboards across Uttarakhand will now be written in Hindi, English and Sanskrit," he said.

"Since Sanskrit is the second official language of Uttarakhand, the names of railway stations written in Urdu on platform signboards in the state will be replaced with those in Sanskrit," the official said.

However, not much will change in the spelling of the names of railway stations in Uttarakhand when they are written in Sanskrit as both Hindi and Sanskrit use the same Devanagari script.

The names of railway stations in Uttarakhand on platform signboards still appear in Urdu as most of them belong to the period when the state was part of Uttar Pradesh where Urdu is the second official language.

However, as per rules of the Railway Manual appropriate change should have been made on these signboards in 2010 after Sanskrit was made the second official language of the state, he said.

Sanskrit was made the second official language of Uttarakhand in 2010 during the chief ministership of Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, who is now Union HRD Minister.