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Chennai: The Greater Chennai Corporation (GCC) has launched a major campaign to remove caste-based names from at least 3,400 roads across the city, replacing them with names of leaders, flowers or other socially neutral words.
The initiative follows the Tamil Nadu government’s directive to all local bodies to identify and rename roads that reflect caste identity.
Superintending Engineer (Bus Routes Roads) N. Thirumurugan said the GCC has asked the revenue department to verify and finalize the list of such roads based on official road registers. “We will finalize the list by Monday,” he said.
Deputy Mayor Mahesh Kumar said that out of 35,000 roads and streets in the city, about 3,400 have caste names.
“In the core city areas, most of the caste names were removed before 2011. The remainder are largely in the seven newly added areas, which were earlier municipalities. All of these will be renamed before the November 19 deadline,” he said.
Once the list is finalised, councilors will be directed to hold Kshetra Sabha meetings in their respective wards to decide on the new names through public consensus.
“The streets will be renamed based on the decision of local residents. We are soon issuing a circular to all councilors,” the deputy mayor said.
Officials explained that the renaming process will follow a clear pattern: if a street name includes a caste surname, it will be shortened to the initial; If the full name refers to a species, it will be replaced by the name of a leader or flower.
In cases where the caste name is used as a suffix, only that part will be removed. Chennai has seen many such changes in recent years.
For example, in T. Nagar, GN Chetty Road was renamed as Gopathy Narayana Road. In West Mambalam, streets like Srinivas (I) Street, Balakrishna (N) Street, and Srinivas (P) Street now bear initials instead of caste surnames.
The stretches identified for transformation include Gengu Reddy Road, Vanniyar Street, Reddy Street in Kodambakkam, Dr Nair Road, Ramanuja Iyer Street in Washermanpet, Reddy Raman Street in Sokarpet and Brahmin Street in Saidapet.
Mahesh Kumar said that after the completion of the name changing process, the corporation will soon issue a tender for installing new 3D name boards with reflective lighting.
–IANS