Sanskrit to Replace Urdu on Railway Signboards in Uttarakhand

Sanskrit was made the second official language of Uttarakhand in 2010 when Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank was CM.

Names of railway stations written in Urdu on platform signboards in Uttarakhand will now be written in Sanskrit.

(Photo Courtesy: Twitter/Dehradun Live)

Names of railway stations written in Urdu on platform signboards in Uttarakhand will now be written in Sanskrit in accordance with the Railway Manual, said Deepak Kumar, Chief Public Relations Officer, Northern Railway on Sunday, 19 January.

“According to the Railway Manual, 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,” he added.

Sanskrit was made the second official language of Uttarakhand in 2010 during the Chief Ministership of Ramesh Pokhriyal Nishank, the current Union HRD Minister.

As per the 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.

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

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 Devnagri script.