India’s Name to Be Changed to Bharat ?
New Delhi September 6, 2023 – As India eagerly anticipates hosting the G20 Summit 2023 in New Delhi later this week, a significant controversy has emerged surrounding President Droupadi Murmu’s official invitation for the G20 dinner. Unconventionally, the invitation is under the title ‘President of Bharat’ rather than the customary ‘President of India’.
Predictably, this unconventional move has stirred a storm of criticism from the Opposition, with Congress leader Jairam Ramesh even asserting that it challenges Article 1 of the Constitution. Article 1 of the Indian Constitution commences with the statement: “India, that is Bharat, is a ‘Union of States’…”.
The Cost of Renaming India to Bharat
India is not the first country to contemplate changing its official name, as such changes have occurred worldwide for various reasons, from improving administrative efficiency to shedding colonial associations or signaling a change in government structure.
India’s southern neighbor, Sri Lanka, underwent a name change in 1972, taking nearly four decades to fully eliminate its former name, ‘Ceylon,’ from all government usage. In 2018, the monarch of Swaziland rebranded the country as Eswatini to eliminate colonial connotations. Intellectual property lawyer Darren Olivier, based in South Africa, devised a method to estimate the cost of renaming a country, likening it to a large corporate rebranding exercise.
Olivier’s model, based on marketing costs for large enterprises (around 6% of total revenue), estimated that rebranding expenses could amount to up to 10% of a company’s overall marketing budget. Using this approach, the cost of renaming Swaziland to Eswatini was estimated at $60 million. Applying a similar model to India’s case, considering its revenue streams, yields an estimated cost of Rs 14,304 crore to rename India as Bharat.
To provide perspective, the Indian government spends close to Rs 14,000 crore each month on its food security program, benefiting 80 crore Indians.
The forthcoming special session of Parliament will likely reveal the government’s seriousness about pursuing the renaming exercise. For now, it is confirmed that foreign heads of state will attend the G20 official dinner hosted by the President of Bharat.
Adding to the intrigue, Assam Chief Minister and BJP leader Himanta Biswa Sharma took to social media platform X, proclaiming, “REPUBLIC OF BHARAT – happy and proud that our civilization is boldly advancing towards AMRIT KAAL.” This shift in the President’s designation hints at possible future changes in the offing, leaving many to ponder the financial implications of officially changing the country’s name.
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Resolution at a Special Parliament Session?
Multiple reports indicate that a resolution to rename India officially as Bharat is likely to be tabled in the forthcoming special session of Parliament, scheduled from September 18 to 22, as announced by Union Minister for Parliamentary Affairs Pralhad Joshi on August 31.
The Lok Sabha Secretariat has since conveyed that this special session will bypass question hour, zero hour, and private members’ business, which has drawn criticism from Opposition parties. If the government proceeds with this resolution, it will also be perceived as a political maneuver against Opposition parties that have united under the banner INDIA. The Opposition alliance, known as the Indian National Developmental Inclusive Alliance (I.N.D.I.A), comprises 26 participating parties and is set to contest the 2024 General Elections as a coalition.
With the central government poised to advance the renaming resolution, it becomes imperative to assess the associated costs. Renaming cities and towns in India in recent years, though seemingly superficial, has entailed alterations at various levels, from the local to the international. This has made it a time-consuming and costly endeavor, necessitating coordination among diverse public and private entities and a perceptual shift among individual citizens.
The complexity of such an undertaking multiplies for India, given its status as the world’s most populous nation and its extraordinary diversity of cultures, languages, and ethnicities residing within its borders.
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Earlier this year, the city of Aurangabad in Maharashtra was renamed Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar, while Osmanabad in Maharashtra became Dharashiv. In 2016, the Haryana state government rebranded Gurgaon as Gurugram, and in 2018, Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh was transformed into Prayagraj. The renaming of Allahabad reportedly incurred costs exceeding Rs 300 crore, as per government sources cited by India Today, covering expenses for updating maps, road navigation systems, highway landmarks, and official materials used in state and civic authority offices, among other things. Private businesses, corporate entities, and non-governmental institutions also bore costs when a city or state underwent a name change.
Read More: Article 1 of constitution
Read More: National News