New Chhattisgarh capital to be named Atal Nagar in memory of late PM

india

Updated: Aug 21, 2018 17:57 IST

Chhattisgarh’s proposed capital, Naya Raipur, will now be named Atal Nagar after former Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the state government decided on Tuesday.

Also commemorating the former prime minister’s contribution to the nation by undertaking another series of nuclear tests in 1998, a battalion of the Chhattisgarh Armed Force (CAF) will be called the Pokhran Battalion.

The decisions were taken a meeting of Chhattisgarh cabinet, chaired by chief minister Raman Singh.

“A memorial of Atal ji will come up in Naya Raipur. A statue of Vajpayee will also be installed at Naya Raipur as well as in all 27 district headquarters of the state and a central park will be developed in Naya Raipur in the name of former prime minister,” Singh told reporters after the meeting.

Naya Raipur is located about 20 km southeast of Raipur.

The chief minister also said that the Bilaspur University, the newly-built medical college in Rajnandgaon, the Marwa Thermal Power Plant in Janjgir-Champa district, and the under-construction expressway in Raipur will also be named after Vajpayee.

On Chhattisgarh formation day, celebrated on October 1, the “Atal Bihari Vajpayee Sushasan award” will be given to panchayats and urban bodies for good governance, he added, while the biography of the former prime minister will also be included in textbooks of Chhattisgarh board of school education.

The cabinet has also decided that the second phase of Singh’s ‘Vikas Yatra’, to be launched from the next month in the run-up to the upcoming assembly polls, will now be called the ‘Atal Vikas Yatra’.

The Chhattisgarh government will also give a national-level poetry award named after former prime minister, who was a renowned poet himself.

Vajpayee, who was prime minister between 1998 and 2004, died in New Delhi’s All India Institute of Medical Sciences, on August 16.