On Thursday afternoon, senior lawyer and Congress leader Abhishek Singhvi made an unusual request, saying that he is requesting the Jammu and Kashmir authorities to change or amend the name of Lakes and Waterways Development Authority. While taking a dig at BJP while making the request to the J&K administration, Singhvi said that while he is not a big fan of name changes, he made an exception this time.
The reason why the Congress leader requested to change the name of the authority was how the acronym of the name sounds. And the matter came up today after ANI reported cleanliness drive conducted at the Dal Lake in Sri Nagar by the Lakes and Waterways Development Authority (LAWDA). Vice-chairman LAWDA Dr Bashir Ahmad Bhat informed that 15-16 machines have been deployed to clean the famous lake, a work paused last year due to Covid-19.
Soon after the tweets, the acronym LAWDA started trending on Twitter, for its similarity to a crude Hindi word. The full name of the organisation is actually Jammu & Kashmir Lakes and Waterways Development Authority, which was created by the government of Jammu and Kashmir as an autonomous body to look after, manage and conserve water bodies and waterways of the state. Therefore, while the short form of the name should be JKLAWDA, LAWDA was used by ANI instead.
Interestingly, the website of the organisation does not use the word LAWDA, it refers to the organisation as JK LDA. But for some reason, the Facebook page of the organisation calls itself LAWDA, even though its username is JKLDA. Moreover, the organisation also uses the JK LAWDA in its official communications. For example, some tender notices uploaded on the website use this acronym, while in some others LDA is used. Therefore, it can be said that the organisation itself is using the LAWDA acronym in some official documents.
This is not the first time LAWDA was trending on social media, every time there is some news report regarding the organisation, netizens post tweets emphasising the acronym.
Now coming back to the request of Abhishek Singhvi, it appears that the Authority can avoid this, if it wants, by using the full name to form the short name, which will be JKLWDA. However, without a vowel in the middle of the word, here each letter will have to be pronounced separately. Adding the ‘a’ from ‘And’ in the short form makes the acronym LAWDA, which can be pronounced as a word, and thus it makes it much easier to pronounce it compared to pronouncing six separate letters. Maybe the organisation can swap two words in the name to change its name to the Waterways and Lakes Development Authority, which will produce the acronym WALDA.
