India's IT capital Bangalore renamed

Bangalore, India's information technology capital, has officially been renamed Bengaluru, eight years after the name change was proposed.

Bangalore is known as Bengaluru in Kannada, a Dravidian language spoken in the Karnataka state, of which it is capital.

Indian authorities have in recent years renamed several key cities in a bid to shake off the British colonial past by replacing anglicised names of the cities with the traditional ones.

The Karnataka government issued a notification changing names of Bangalore and 11 more cities in the state effective on Saturday.

The name Bengaluru has grown in popularity and is extensively used to describe the city, which has become to be known as India's Silicon Valley because of the hundreds of IT companies based there.