Indian rupee sign

Indian rupee sign

The Indian rupee sign (sign: INR; code: INR) is the currency sign for the Indian rupee, the official currency of India. Designed by D. Udaya Kumar, it was presented to the public by the Government of India on 15 July 2010,[1] following its selection through an “open” competition among Indian residents. The symbol uses U+20B9 ₹ indian rupee sign Unicode character. Before its adoption, the most commonly used symbols for the rupee were Rs, Re or, if the text was in an Indian language, an appropriate abbreviation in that language. The new sign relates solely to the Indian rupee; other countries that use a rupee, such as Sri Lanka, Pakistan and Nepal, still use the generic U+20A8 ₨ rupee sign character.

The design resembles both the Devanagari letter "र" (ra) and the Latin capital letter "R", with a double horizontal line at the top.

Origin of the symbol

On 5 March 2009, the Indian government announced a contest to create a sign for the Indian rupee.[2][3] During the 2010 Union Budget, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee said that the proposed sign should reflect and capture the Indian ethos and culture.[4] From around 3,331 responses received, five symbols were shortlisted.[5] These were the entries from Nondita Correa-Mehrotra, Hitesh Padmashali, Shibin KK, Shahrukh J. Irani, and D. Udaya Kumar[6][7] and one of them was due to be selected at the Union Council of Ministers of India meeting held on 24 June 2010.[8] However, the decision was deferred at the request of the Finance Minister,[4] and the final decision was made when they met again on 15 July 2010,[1] when they chose the symbol created by Udaya Kumar, Associate Professor IIT Guwahati.[9]

Design

The new sign is a combination of the Devanagari letter "र" (ra) and the Latin capital letter "R" without its vertical bar (similar to the R rotunda). The parallel lines at the top (with white space between them) are said to make an allusion to the tricolor Indian flag.[10] and also depict an equality sign that symbolizes the nation's desire to reduce economic disparity.[11]

The final selected symbol was designed by D. Udaya Kumar, a Bachelor of Architecture and visual design student at the Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay. The thoughts and philosophy behind the design are explained in this presentation.[12]

Controversy

The Indian rupee sign selection process was challenged in the Delhi High Court,[13] by petitioner Rakesh Kumar, who was a participant in the competition, described the process as “full of discrepancies” and “flawed”, and named the Finance Ministry and the chairman of Indian Rupee Symbol Selection Committee as respondents.[13] On 26 November 2010, the Delhi High Court single bench dismissed the writ petition, stating there was no justifiable ground for the stated allegations.[14]

But later The Hon’ble High Court of Delhi, on 30.01.2013, in W.P. (c) 2449/2012 titled Rakesh Kumar Singh Vs. Union of India (PIL) filed through lawyer Kamal Kumar Pandey, listed before the Division bench of Hon’ble Chief Justice and V.K.Jain J., taking cognizance of and in view of the irregularities and arbitrariness involved in Public Competitions (Indian Rupee, UIDAI, I Mark, Indian railway for Common Wealth, RTI) for designing Symbols/Logos or designing Logos by other methods of important national bodies/institutions, in their historic judgment directed all the ministries of the Government of India to formulate/prepare guidelines to ensure transparency, wider participation of public and also that such guidelines should be of uniform nature and in uniformity with each others.

On April 11, 2013 Finance Ministry formed the guidelines for conducting public competitions for design of symbol/logo.

Usage

New two-rupee coin with the Rupee sign.

Upon the symbol’s adoption in July 2010, the Indian government said it would try to adopt the sign within six months in the country and globally within 18 to 24 months.[1]

Various new solutions on how to use the new symbol have been also developed, such as WebRupee providing an API that facilitates the usage of the Rupee symbol over the Web. Additionally, the Ubuntu operating system is the first computer software, out of the box, to support the new rupee symbol.[15]

Major banks have also started printing cheques with the new Indian rupee sign, where the traditional ₨ sign was used. The Indian Postal Department also started printing postage stamps with this new Indian rupee sign, when it issued the Commonwealth Games commemorative stamps on 3 October 2010.[16] In his budget speech on 28 February 2011, the finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, announced that the sign will be incorporated in future coin issues.[17] Coins of denomination of INR 1, INR 2, INR 5 and INR 10 with the new rupee symbol have been put into circulation.[18][19] As of January 2012, the new Indian rupee sign has been incorporated in the currency notes in the denominations of INR 10, INR 100, INR 500 and INR 1000[20][21][22][23] and as of 12 April 2012 this was extended to denominations of INR 20 and INR 50.[24]

Unicode

On 10 August 2010, the Unicode Technical Committee accepted the proposed code position U+20B9 ₹ indian rupee sign (HTML ₹ · graphic:).[25] The character has been encoded in the Unicode 6.0, and named distinctly from the existing character U+20A8 ₨ rupee sign (HTML ₨), which will continue to be available as the generic rupee sign.[26][27]

Ubuntu became the first operating system to support the Indian rupee symbol by default. Since its 10.10 version it has supported the symbol out of the box,[28] as it was added to the Ubuntu font family by a contributor.[29] Since then, it has been included in various GNU/Linux distributions.

On 18 May 2011, Microsoft released an update KB2496898[30] to Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 operating systems to include support for this new Indian rupee symbol. With the Windows update, it is now possible to use alt code text entry to obtain the Indian Rupee symbol - Alt 8377. On systems running Windows 8, the symbol can be typed using the English (India) keyboard layout with the key combination Alt Gr+4.

Apple Inc. has added support for the rupee symbol with iOS 7. Mac OS X Lion (10.7) also includes the new Indian rupee symbol and can be found in the Character Viewer. As of Mac OS X Mountain Lion (10.8), users using the Devanagari keyboard can enter the new Indian rupee symbol by typing Option/Alt+4 (a combination that yields the Cent symbol on a US keyboard layout).

Sailfish OS also provides the symbol in its default keyboard.

See also

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 "Cabinet approves new rupee symbol". Times of India. 2010-07-15. Retrieved 2010-07-15.
  2. ↑ http://finmin.nic.in/the_ministry/dept_eco_affairs/currency_coinage/Comp_Design.pdf COMPETITION FOR DESIGN
  3. ↑ "India seeks global symbol for rupee". Hindustan Times. 2009-03-06. Retrieved 2009-03-07.
  4. ↑ 4.0 4.1 "Cabinet defers decision on rupee symbol". Sify Finance. 2010-06-24. Retrieved 2010-07-10.
  5. ↑ "List of Five Entries which have been selected for Final". Ministry of Finance, Govt of India. Archived from the original on 2010-07-11. Retrieved 2010-07-15.
  6. ↑ "Rupee: Which of the 5 final designs do you like?". Rediff Business. 2010-06-16. Retrieved 2010-07-26.
  7. ↑ "List of Five Entries which have been selected for Final". Ministry of Finance, Govt of India. Archived from the original on 2010-07-11. Retrieved 2010-07-15.
  8. ↑ "Rupee to get a symbol today!". Money Control.com. 2010-02-26. Retrieved 2010-07-10.
  9. ↑ IITG Department of Design
  10. ↑ "Indian Rupee Joins Elite Currency Club". Theworldreporter.com. 2010-07-17.
  11. ↑ http://www.idc.iitb.ac.in/events/Indian_Rupee_Symbol.pdf
  12. ↑ Ruppe book 3.indd
  13. ↑ 13.0 13.1 Nair, Harish V (23 November 2010). "‘Rs' selection process challenged in High Cout [sic]". Hindustan Times. Retrieved 25 November 2010.
  14. ↑ "W.P.(C) No. 7915 of 2010 & CMs 20440-41/2010". Scribd. Retrieved 2011-02-28.
  15. ↑ Ubuntu 10.10 First OS to Have Indian Rupee Symbol
  16. ↑ http://www.indiapost.gov.in/netscape/Stamps2010.html Indian stamp issues 2010
  17. ↑ http://www.thestatesman.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=360686&catid=40 Coins with new Rupee symbol soon
  18. ↑ "Issue of new series of Coins". RBI. Retrieved 4 November 2011.
  19. ↑ "This numismatist lays hands on coins with Rupee symbol". Times of India. 29 August 2011. Retrieved 4 November 2011.
  20. ↑ "Issue of ₹10 Banknotes with incorporation of Rupee symbol". RBI. Retrieved 23 January 2012.
  21. ↑ "Issue of ₹ 500 Banknotes with incorporation of Rupee symbol". RBI. Retrieved 23 January 2012.
  22. ↑ "Issue of ₹ 1000 Banknotes with incorporation of Rupee symbol". RBI. Retrieved 23 January 2012.
  23. ↑ "Issue of ₹ 100 Banknotes with incorporation of Rupee symbol". RBI. Retrieved 23 January 2012.
  24. ↑ "RBI to issue Rs 20 and Rs 50 notes with the new rupee symbol". Economic Times. 12 April 2012. Retrieved 30 April 2012.
  25. ↑ Michael Everson (2010-07-19). "Proposal to encode the INDIAN RUPEE SIGN in the UCS" (PDF). Retrieved 2010-07-30.
  26. ↑ Unicode Currency Chart
  27. ↑ U+20B9: Rupee gets Unicode identity
  28. ↑ The Ubuntu Font, now with added Rupee
  29. ↑ The Indian Rupee sign
  30. ↑ An update to support the new currency symbol for the Indian Rupee

External links

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