The West Bengal (WB) Assembly on July 26 unanimously passed a bill to change the state’s name to ‘Bangla’. The resolution will now be sent to the Union Home Ministry for further approval. Once the bill is approved, West Bengal’s name will officially be changed to ‘Bangla’.In August 2016, WB Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee had proposed that the state be named Bangla in Bengali, Bangal in Hindi and Bengal in English. However, the Central Government had turned down the state government’s proposal.
One of the main reasons cited by West Bengal to change the name is because WB is always last in a list of states in alphabetical order whenever there was a meeting of all states or any event CM herself was supposed to address any meeting between the Union government and the states, West Bengal came at the bottom of the list alphabetically.
Before that in 2011 when Mamata Banerjee took the office of chief minister of the state, the state government had sent a proposal to the Centre for renaming West Bengal as “Paschim Bango”, but that too was rejected.
