COIMBATORE: Volunteers from the district kicked off a signature campaign demanding to change the district's name as 'Kovai' instead of Koyampuththoor.
The online campaign named as 'KOVAI', has got over 3,000 supporters, who have signed the petition and commented their views on Thursday.
The volunteers have planned to submit the petition to Chief Minister Edappadi K Palaniswami, Municipal Administration Minister SP Velumani and K Pandiyarajan, and the Minister for Tamil Official Language and Tamil Culture.
As per the experts committee, Tamil Nadu government issued a notification for changing the English names of 1,018 places to match their exact Tamil pronunciation.
Though the announcement in this regard was made in December 2018 and the government order G.O. for the changed names was issued on April 1, the government released it only on Wednesday.
In this, Coimbatore was changed as Koyampuththoor.
While Tamil enthusiasts appreciated the re-naming, many of the locals ask to change the name as Kovai instead of Koyampuththoor.
They said that 'Koyampuththoor' has a few drawbacks that are the name is very long, the spelling is difficult to remember and also it makes difficult while filling up official forms.
Meanwhile, they listed the advantages of calling the district as Kovai.
"We have sent this petition to all industrialists as well as to common people to address their opinion on it. So far, 99 per cent of respondents have opposed the name change and also asked to suit the name as Kovai. After receiving a maximum number of responses, we will submit it before the government," said CR Swaminathan, former chairman of CII -southern region and former president national president of Institute of Indian Foundrymen.
Few others commented that Koyampuththoor is more colloquial. If the government wants to change the anglicised name, it should be ideally named its ancient name of Kovanpuththoor, they opined.
