In Uttarakhand, names of the railway stations in Urdu will soon be replaced by Sanskrit, which is the second official language in the hill state.

Deepak Kumar, chief public relations officer, northern railway said that the move of replacing Urdu with Sanksrit is under the provisions of 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, reported Live Mint.

The names of railway stations in Uttarakhand on platform signboards are in Urdu as most of them belonged 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, the appropriate change should have been made on these signboards in 2010 after Sanskrit was made the second official language of the state, he said.

‘It was pointed out to us recently that Sanskrit is the second language of Uttarakhand. Hence, names of railway stations should be in Sanskrit too. However, it is a daunting task for us to know how the names of cities will be written in Sanskrit,’ said Rekha Sharma, senior divisional commercial manager (DCM).

However, a local Sanskrit teacher said that the names of railway stations in Hindi and Sanskrit will mostly be the same except for an ‘m’-sound in the end.

Under chief ministership of Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, Sanskrit became the second official language of Uttarakhand in 2010.

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