Assam govt seeks to change civic body''s name from Gauhati to Guwahati

The Assam government on Monday proposed to change the name of Gauhati Municipal Corporation to Guwahati Municipal Corporation to remove "dissimilarity and dichotomy" between English and Assamese script.

Introducing The Guwahati Municipal Corporation (Amendment) Bill, 2020 in the Assam Assembly, the Guwahati Development Minister Siddhartha Bhattacharya said that 'Guwahati' instead of 'Gauhati' is used in numerous rules and bylaws framed under the original Gauhati Municipal Corporation Act, 1969.

"There is apparent dissimilarity and dichotomy in the same prefix in their English versus Assamese letters/script. The people residing in the state are entitled as a matter of right to call, depict, use and refer to the name of state capital 'Guwahati' without any lingual distortion," he said.

The Guwahati Municipal Corporation (Amendment) Act, 2020 will correct the nomenclature of 'Gauhati' used in the principal Act, which is the Gauhati Municipal Corporation Act, 1969, Bhattacharya said in the Statement of Objects and Reasons of the Bill.

The tabled Bill also sought to amend that the State Election Commissioner will conduct the municipal polls instead of the Commissioner of GMC. "With the seventy-fourth amendment of the Constitution of India in 1992 (with effect from June 1, 1993), this power now is vested upon the State Election Commission," the minister said.

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