NDMC replaces Gurmukhi signs bearing typos, tries to find more
The NDMC official also said that a spellcheck drive has been ordered across New Delhi with the help of experts
The New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) has started a drive to identify spelling mistakes in Gurmukhi script across road signboards in New Delhi — a week after HT highlighted that several road names in Punjabi were riddled with inaccuracies on the signage in the area.
On October 26, HT reported how Janpath was erroneously spelled “Janpadh”, Akbar Road became “Akbah Hoad”, Kautilya Marg turned into “Catliya Marg” and Jai Singh Road into “Jai Saghi Road”.
An NDMC spokesperson said that the errors on signage highlighted in the report have been rectified. On Thursday, HT did spot check and found that many of these errors had been rectified.
The NDMC official also said that a spellcheck drive has been ordered across New Delhi with the help of experts.
The spellcheck exercise will cover both Urdu and Gurmukhi, the two co-official languages of Delhi. “The highlighted signage have been replaced with correct spellings. To spellcheck all remaining signage, NDMC will use the expertise of Punjabi and Urdu language academies. Both the academies have been contacted. Based on the report of the respective academies, rectification will be carried out,” the spokesperson added.
Apart from this, the civil engineering department of the civic body has ordered the engineers to identify spelling errors in their respective areas, said the spokesperson.
The signage for major roads in Delhi have the names first written in Hindi, followed by English, Gurmukhi, and then Urdu.
A second NDMC official said that letters have been written to the Urdu and Punjabi language academies with the entire list of road names in Lutyens’ Delhi, along with their official names.
“Academies will help us undertake a field survey with correct spellings in Gurmukhi and Urdu. Directions have been issued to wrap up the survey soon. In case of doubt in pronunciation of foreign names, we will get in touch with the respective embassies,” the second official added.
NDMC manages 1,298 km of roads in central Delhi, along with 52 rotaries and roundabouts where there are more than 5,343 signage in place. Officials said that the real number might be much higher as each road has multiple signage at various ends and intersections.