Amid the growing speculation of India’s evolving linguistic renaming row, Google Maps has quietly made a subtle yet significant change by embracing the term ‘Bharat’ as a representation of the country alongside its English counterpart, ‘India’.
As per reports, upon searching ‘Bharat’ on Google Maps, it now shows it as a ‘Country in South Asia’ alongside a digital image of the Indian flag.
With this new feature, users can now see the official map of India by entering either ‘Bharat’ or ‘India’ as the keyword. The user simply needs to type ‘Bharat’ and tap the spacebar, upon doing so the user will be directed to the official Indian map.
However, this transformation isn’t limited to just Google Maps. Across a spectrum of Google services, including Search, Translator, News, and more, users are now presented with the choice of using ‘Bharat’ or ‘India’ to access similar results.
Even though Google has not yet made any official announcement about this change, this move comes weeks after the Indian government used “President of Bharat” instead of “President of India” in the invites sent for the G20 dinner.
