Renaming India to Bharat will cost an estimated 14,300 crore, higher than the amount India spends every month to feed 80 crore Indians.
As per media reports, the resolution of renaming India is likely to be taken up in the Special Session of Parliament which is scheduled from the 18th of September to the 21st. Notably, the move has come few weeks after the opposition alliance named itself INDIA.
This comes as the official invite to the G20 Heads of State and ministers for a dinner being hosted by President Droupadi Murmu has gone with the heading President of Bharat.
The controversy started a day after the formation of coalition named India, when the Assam Chief Minister Himanta Biswa Sarma announced on twitter, “REPUBLIC OF BHARAT – happy and proud that our civilisation is marching ahead boldly towards AMRIT KAAL”. REPUBLIC OF BHARAT – happy and proud that our civilisation is marching ahead boldly towards AMRIT KAAL — Himanta Biswa Sarma (@himantabiswa) September 5, 2023
BJP MP Harnath Singh Yadav told news agency ANI, “The entire country is demanding that we should use the word ‘Bharat’ instead of ‘India’…The word ‘India’ is an abuse given to us by the British whereas the word ‘Bharat’ is a symbol of our culture…I want there should be a change in our Constitution and the word ‘Bharat’ should be added to it…”
India is a large country, therefore renaming it might take many months because it will necessitate throwing away and then replacing all kinds of official records and documents at the district, tehsil, state, national, and international levels.
This drawn-out procedure necessitates extensive collaboration between many public and commercial institutions. Additionally, it might take a while for people to make the mental adjustment from referring to their country as India to suddenly claiming they are from Bharat. Of course, maintaining social media profiles will add to this burden for every internet user.
“The paperwork, the website, the signage on government properties, and government agencies will require huge expenditure. Then there is the other cost people will have to bear, which may be higher than that” said a professor who teaches economics at a Government college in Jammu Kashmir. Updating maps, sign boards, highway landmarks, official goods utilized in state and municipal government offices and navigational aids are some of the things that would incur costs for the name change, he said.
He claimed that the complexity of such an effort would be increased for a country like India, which is not only the most populated in the world but also one of the most diversified, with a vast diversity of cultures, languages, and ethnicities residing inside its geographical borders.
Since gaining independence, the British were mostly to blame for name changes. The only reason for changing Trivandrum to Thiruvananthapuram or Cochin to Kochi was to correct British spelling. However, a total of 244 locations have had their names altered since independence by 21 different states.
Although the state is not at the forefront of changing place names, Uttar Pradesh experiences the most controversy when cities are renamed. The state of Andhra Pradesh has renamed up to 76 locations. Kerala has changed the names of 26 locations, while Tamil Nadu has modified the names of 31 locations. Additionally, Maharashtra changed the names of 18 locations. In Uttar Pradesh, only 8 cities have had their names changed since independence.
Nine states and two union territories have had their names altered since 1947.
What will be the cost of the new name– Bharat?
In the recent years, several cities in India have undergone name changes. Even though the price of such an exercise is never made public, it undoubtedly has a high price. Renaming of Allahabad to Prayagraj, Uttar Pradesh (U.P) in 2018, shortly after Yogi Adityanath became the Chief Minister of the state cost the Government around 300 crores, several reports appearing in the media said.
This year, the Maharashtrian city of Aurangabad was renamed Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar. At the same time, Dharashiv was given to Osmanabad in Maharashtra. In 2016, the state of Haryana changed the name of Gurgaon to Gurugram.
India is not the first nation to think of changing its name officially. Changing colonial street names in Pretoria, South Africa, has cost millions of rand. The Kenyan president ordered that the country’s streets be renamed to their non-colonial equivalents in the middle of the 20th century; this procedure took years and a huge cost. Street names in the African Quarter of Berlin that are associated with colonial past were also flagged for removal. Therefore, one tax imposed by post-colonialism is the cost associated with eradicating the last remnants of the past.
Sri Lanka, India’s southern neighbor, changed its name in 1972, but it took the island country nearly 40 years to stop using its previous name, “Ceylon,” in any official capacities.
According to intellectual property lawyer and blogger Darren Olivier, who is located in South Africa, changing the name of the nation is not only a formality. He says, “There is fundamental worth in that identity and what it implies for the people. There is value in it. However, changing one’s identity comes with a cost, a physical expense.”
He has published a blog in order to calculate the cost of name change of Eswatini, in which he estimated that it will cost the country $6 million (49,88,56,800) to change its name. Eswatini, formally the Kingdom of Eswatini and formerly named Swaziland changed its name in 2018.
In his blog, Darren Olivier combined nation’s taxable and non-taxable revenue of around $1 billion. According to him, the typical marketing expenditure for a big business is about 6% of revenue. In this instance, that would be $60 million, and rebranding budgets normally account for 10% of total marketing expenses. This provides the $6 million that the Eswatini administration may ultimately need to find.
That is “not insignificant” for such a small nation, as Olivier points out in his blog.
The price of changing India’s name is extremely high if Olivier’s approach is used. India’s total revenue for the fiscal year 22-2023 was Rs 23.84 lakh crore, including both tax and non-tax revenue. In order to calculate the cost of Swaziland’s renaming, Olivier’s model took into account both revenue sources.
Changing India’s name to Bharat would cost about Rs 14,304, according to the same calculation used to determine India’s revenue.
It is noteworthy that India spends 14,000 crores per month to feed more than 80 crore Indians.