Soon, there may be no West in Bengal

Citing examples of other states like Odisha and cities like Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, he said the word “Bengal” has the state’s culture and heritage associated with it and so it was decided to change it.

Earlier, the state government had sent a proposal to the Centre for renaming the East Indian state of West Bengal as “Paschim Bango”, but that never got the green signal.

“Now we are giving a new proposal and will convene a special session of the assembly on August 26 to pass a resolution to this effect,” Chatterjee said adding that he would urge everyone to support the proposal for sake of the state’s betterment or development.

Another reason for changing the name of the state is that whenever there is any meeting of all states, West Bengal comes at the bottom of the list alphabetically. “Our CM gets to speak last. There is little time left,” a minister pointed out.

Secretariat officials said changing the name would require approval of Parliament.

It may be mentioned that this is the second time when the Mamata Banerjee government is going ahead with a proposal to change the name of its state. It was just a few months after coming to power in 2011, the state government had approached the Centre with their proposal of changing the name of West Bengal to “Paschim Banga”.

In 2011, various names such as Bangla, Banga, Banga Pradesh and also Paschim Banga were proposed but Paschim Banga had earned consensus and it would have raised the state’s position to 21st. “It would be much better if the state’s name would be Bangla or Banga for administrative purposes,” said a senior official.  

The leader of the Opposition, Abdul Mannan said that he would react only after discussing the matter with party senior leaders.

Top industrialist Sanjay Budhia said: “This is a very positive, much awaited change reflecting the reality. The word “West” was superfluous in the present context. Now there is No “East” No “West” - “Bengal” is the Best.”

Litterateur, Sirshendu Mukherjee and poet Sankha Ghosh lauded the effort of the state government to rename Bengal. Mukherjee said that East Bengal doesn’t exist so the name Appreciating the move, educationist Pabitra Sarkar said that he had been expecting for the past many years that the name of the state would change.