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4 years ago

EC floats proposal to rename local govt bodies, posts in Bangla

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The Election Commission has put forward a proposal to rename local government bodies such as City Corporation, Municipality and Union Parishad in Bangla by reforming the existing laws, bdnews24.com reports.

It also suggested changing the names of posts held by public representatives in these organisations.

A meeting chaired by Chief Election Commissioner KM Nurul Huda on Monday was expected to review the proposal.

The use of 'irrelevant' English names and words was discovered during the efforts to reform the election-related laws of local government bodies, the EC said in the proposal. An initiative has been taken to replace the 'unnecessary and foreign' names and words with Bangla terminology.

Some of the changes include renaming City Corporation to Mahanagar, Pouroshabha to Nagarshabha, and Union Parishad to Polli Parishad.

The proposal has not gone down well in some quarters with the BNP criticising the initiative in a letter to the EC.

The party said it was "unethical and unnecessary" to change the names and titles of elected representatives of well-known local government bodies while the EC itself was continuing to use English words such as ‘commission’ and ‘commissioner.’

Many English words such as speaker, deputy speaker, Supreme Court, High Court, commission, commissioner, voter, returning officer, presiding officer, polling officer and many others are used commonly across the country, the BNP said. A lot of political parties also did not undergo name changes.

English words such as chairman, councillor, city, corporation have found their place in the Bangla dictionary of Bangla Academy as synonyms of Bangla words.

EC officials said other reform proposals will also be presented at the meeting.

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