New Indian Rupee Symbol

India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world. It was only fitting that currency of India; rupee will soon have a distinct and identifiable symbol. The new symbol will be a perfect representative of strength of the over-trillion-dollar Indian economy. The arrival of new Indian rupee symbol has catapulted India to a very elite league. Currently, there is an exclusive club of international currencies namely - the US dollar, the British pound, the Japanese yen and the euro and now the Indian rupee. The new rupee symbol has been designed by Mr D. Udaya Kumar who is a post graduate from IIT, Mumbai. Indian government had announced a nationwide contest for new rupee symbol. More than 3000 entries were received in this national competition. It was truly a tough challenge to select one design because of quality of several other designs. Government had formed a jury headed by the RBI Deputy Governor. The jury evaluated all the designs and selected the one designed by Mr. Kumar. The new symbol is a wonderful blend of the Devanigiri ‘Ra' and roman ‘R'.


What new rupee symbol does is to lend a distinctive character and identity to the Indian currency. In some ways, it reflects the strength of the growing Indian economy. There are few other countries whose currencies are also designated as Rupee or Rupiah, like Indonesia, Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka. New rupee symbol will help Indian currency in distinguishing itself from other currencies. Now, Indian currency will be internationally recognized just the way Yen, Dollar and Pound are recognized.

The further course of action aims at inclusion of the symbol in the Indian standard also known as Indian script Code for Information Interchange (ISCII). This will ensure assigning codes to the symbol for processing on computers. New Indian rupee symbol will also need to be included in the Unicode standard which basically refers to an international encoding scheme applied to uniquely identify characters. The process can take few months. As of now, there is no plan of printing or embossing of the symbol on Indian currency notes or coins.