The error: ((nihongo)): Japanese or romaji text required (help) 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. 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 D Udaya Kumar, son of N. Dharmalingam, a former DMKMLA.[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[citation needed].
The final selected symbol was designed by D Udaya Kumar, a B.Arch and student of visual communication at the Industrial Design Centre, IIT Bombay. The thoughts and philosophy behind the design are explained in this presentation.[11]
Controversy
The Indian rupee sign selection process was challenged in the Delhi High Court,[12] 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.[12] On 26 November 2010, the Delhi High Court single bench dismissed the writ petition, stating there was no justifiable ground for the stated allegations.[13]
Usage
New two Rupees 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.[14]
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.[15] In his budget speech on 28 February 2011, the finance minister, Pranab Mukherjee, announced that the sign will be incorporated in future coin issues.[16] Coins of denomination of 1, 2, 5, and 10 rupees with the new rupee symbol have been put into circulation.[17][18] As of January 2012, the new Indian rupee sign has been incorporated in the currency notes in the denominations of ₹ 10, 100, 500, and 1000[19][20][21][22] and as of 12 April 2012 this was extended to denominations of ₹ 20 and 50.[23]
There still remains no widespread, uniform way to enter this symbol into computers as it is not present on the majority of keyboards, even those sold in India.
Unicode
On 10 August 2010, the Unicode Technical Committee accepted the proposed code position U+20B9₹INDIAN RUPEE SIGN (graphic:).[24] The character has been encoded in the Unicode 6.0, and named distinctly from the existing character U+20A8₨RUPEE SIGN, which will continue to be available as the generic rupee sign.[25][26]
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,[27] as it was added to the Ubuntu font family by a contributor.[28]
The rupee symbol has been added in Fedora 15, codenamed as Lovelock.[29]
On 18 May 2011, Microsoft released an update to Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 operating systems to include support for this new Indian rupee symbol. This update includes font support, locale changes, and keyboard support.[30] With the Windows update, it is now possible to use alt code text entry to obtain the Indian Rupee symbol - Alt 8377.
Apple Inc. has added support for the rupee symbol with iOS 5.
^ abc"Cabinet approves new rupee symbol". Times of India. 15 July 2010. Retrieved 15 July 2010. Cite error: The named reference "Final symbol" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
^ ab"Cabinet defers decision on rupee symbol". Sify Finance. 24 June 2010. Retrieved 10 July 2010. Cite error: The named reference "PTI symbol" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
Category.jpg)
