Basavaraj Horatti, the education minister who implemented the decree, insists that he is not anti-English, but was merely enforcing a ruling from Karnataka's supreme court that all new private schools must teach in Kannada.
But the change of name comes at a sensitive time in Karnataka, where the government recently went a step further and threatened with closure more than 2, 000 private schools that taught in English, not Kannada, the local language.