Union Cabinet Approves Name Change of Kerala to ‘Keralam’
Kerala Chief Minister Pinarayi Vijayan, who had moved the resolution, urged the Union Government of India to change the State name from Kerala to “Keralam”
The Union Cabinet on Tuesday (February 24, 2026) approved the proposal to rename the State as “Keralam”, Union Minister Ashwini Vaishnaw announced. Earlier, on June 24, 2024, the Kerala Legislative Assembly had unanimously passed a resolution requesting the Centre to adopt the new name.
The decision comes ahead of the Kerala Assembly elections expected to be held in April–May. An upcoming hearing in the Supreme Court of India scheduled for April.
Senior Congress leader Shashi Tharoor on Tuesday reacted with wordplay after the Union Cabinet approved the renaming of Kerala as ‘Keralam’, raising a light-hearted linguistic question on what residents of the state would now be called in English.
In a post on X, the Thiruvananthapuram MP wondered about the future of commonly used terms such as “Keralite" and “Keralan".
“All to the good, no doubt, but a small linguistic question for the Anglophones among us: what happens now to the terms ‘Keralite’ and ‘Keralan’ for the denizens of the new ‘Keralam’? ‘Keralamite’ sounds like a microbe and ‘Keralamian’ like a rare earth mineral," Tharoor wrote, joking that the Kerala government could consider launching a competition to coin new terms.