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India confident with new Rupee symbol

admin — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 09:18:11 +0000

Symbol for indian rupee to change from “Rs” and “INR”

THE Indian rupee will join the dollar, yen, euro and pound with its own unique symbol

Until now the Indian rupee has been denoted by the abbreviation ‘Rs’ or INRs to distinguish it from neighboring countries like Pakistan and Sri Lanka which also have rupees or indonesia which has rupiah. The indian rupee will soon have the Hindi character closest to ‘R’ with a horizontal line crossing the middle like the euro just like the “US dollar” has the dollar sign or “the pound” having the pound symbol.

New rupee symbol ready for use on computers

Fret no more about downloading the rupee symbol on to your computer. The symbol may take a while to appear on the keyboard but can rightaway be typed as a character, thanks to a newly-created font.

The design for the indian rupee was chosen in a competition won by a teacher at one of the country’s Indian Institutes of Technology. Uday Kumar’s design was chosen from a shortlist of five and he was awarded around £3,500 in prize money.

Mangalore-based Foradian Technologies Pvt Ltd has created a font called Rupee_Foradian. It can be downloaded from the company’s blogsite — http://blog.foradian.com — and used for free. The company’s CEO Unni Koroth told TOI that it was "something of an amusement to us in this era of technological advancement" that the government of India said it would take more than a year for the symbol to become commercially available. "We thought of doing something about it," he said. The company created a vector image of the new rupee sign and mapped the ‘grave accent’ symbol — the key just above the tab button on the keyboard — with it. This keystroke was chosen because most users and programmers don’t use it.

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A YouTube video — Shows how easy it is to use the symbol.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=XSfhzuU7Crw

India’s decision to adopt a symbol reflects its rising confidence as its economy grows at more than nine per cent. India is expected to overtake China as the world’s fastest growing economy in the next twenty years and the rupee is expected to be ranked alongside the euro, dollar, pound and yen before then.

"It’s a big statement on the Indian currency… The symbol would lend a distinctive character and identity to the currency and further highlight the strength and global face of the Indian economy," Information and Broadcasting Minister Ambika Soni told reporters after the cabinet meeting.