NEW DELHI: The New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) has engaged language experts, Punjabi and Urdu academicians, for a ‘spell-check drive’ to rectify spelling errors in Gurmukhi and Urdu texts on signboards across the New Delhi area.
The move has come after several typographical errors were brought to the civic body’s notice, where names of places had been misspelt in Gurmukhi or Urdu scripts on signages. The issue was recently raised by the Delhi Sikh Gurdwara Committee to the council members.
While the misspelt signages pointed out by the committee were replaced with correct signages after being flagged, the language experts will be consulted the civic body to survey all existing signboards and to rectify errors if spotted.
Officials said in previous signboards, names of major roads like Janpath were erroneously spelled “Janpadh” in Punjabi. Akbar Road was written as “Akbah Hoad” while Kautilya Marg was spelled as “Catliya Marg”.
“The signboards containing spelling errors have been replaced with the corrected ones. However, we are taking help from language experts from Punjabi and Urdu academies to run a spell-check drive for the rest of the signs. We will replace others as well if pointed out by the experts during the inspection,” said Radha Krishan, director, of press and information, at NDMC.
In the NDMC area, signages for major roads have names first written in Hindi, followed by English, Gurmukhi, and Urdu. Officials estimate that there may be around 5,500 signboards on the roads and lanes managed by the NDMC.
Last month, Singapore’s High Commissioner to India, Simon Wong, had flagged that his native country’s name had been misspelt as ‘Singapur’ in English on a signboard. Wong shared a picture of the signage carrying the wrong spelling on the signboard on social media. The board was replaced by the NDMC immediately.
Officials said that the reason behind the spelling errors is that the civic body does not have their own language translators and experts after the previous ones retired.“None has been hired by the NDMC after the last Punjabi translator retired in 2013 and the Urdu language translator who retired in 2018. The posts remain vacant till date,” a senior official said.