MADURAI: A panchayat in Virudhunagar district has named 105 of its streets with Tamil words drawn from the seasons, flowers and even the dialects of language so as to redeem them from being known merely by numbers. Aathipatti panchayat president V Rajeswari, who is behind this move, has now got them loaded onto google maps to make it easy to identify addresses.
Aathipatti which borders Virudhunagar municipality had only two main areas earlier — Aathipatti and Kattakanjampatti, but now it has many extension areas including Narayanapuram, Lakshmi Nagar, Pethammal Nagar, NGO colony and Jayaram Nagar. Former panchayat president Yoga Vasudevan said that since it was a vast area, postal services and visitors found it difficult to identify addresses among the numerous streets which were known more by their directions and numbers.
That was when panchayat president V Rajeswari decided to give them proper Tamil names. Some streets were named after flowers such as Malli, Mullai, Thamarai, others after seasons such as Chittirai, Vaikasi, Avani Masi, Panguni, or after rivers such as Vaigai, Gangai, Thenpennai, Kauvery, Adayar, Krishna etc. Even Tamil’s various dialects like Senthamizh, Muthamizh, Painthamizh have got into the names of streets. ``People used to say the fourth street on the north of Narayanapuram, which caused a lot of confusion and delay. Now, even online deliveries are made to their homes without much problem,’’ said Santhi, a resident. Many streets have been named after each stage of the moon’s cycle, like Paal nila, Ilampirai, Niraimathi and Pournami. She said names coming under one category were given in a specific area for easy identification. For example, there are 20 streets each on the right and left of Sempatti and road all of them have been named after flowers.
Narayananapuram has street named after seasons such as Vaigarai, Karmuhuil, Elavenil, Vasantham. One region where there are many farmers has streets named as Sevalai, Senkarumbu, Sennel, Pasumai and Arumbu, names of agricultural crops. Naming the streets in pure Tamil was also to prevent disputes as no one disagreed and many took pride in the name of their streets, said Rajeswari. She says that she now has an additional job of authorising the change of address in the Aadhaar card of her 11,000 residents with the new street names.
