Indian Rupee Symbol: Typing Unicode Font for Computers soon

The Indian Government has introduuced a symbol for the Indian Rupee. The new symbol is a blend of the Devanagri script 'र' and Roman letter 'R' , designed by Mumbai Indian Institute of Technology postgraduate D Udaya Kumar.

This symbol will be used by all individuals/entities within and outside India after its incorporation in `Unicode Standard’, ‘ISO/IEC 10646’ and ‘IS 13194’.

The currency of India, Rupee has been designated just as 'Rs.' all the years, where as the American Dollar ($), Euro (€), Pound (£) etc had their own symbols.

Department of Economic Affairs - Currency and Coinage Division had invited designs for a symbol for Indian Rupees in a circular dated 20th July 2009. Over 3000 entries were received, which were evaluated by a Jury headed by the Deputy Governor, RBI, which also included experts from three reputed art and design Institutes

The winning desing was selected from five shortlisted entries which included from

Correa-Mehtorta -Harvard University-trained architect

Hitesh Padamshali - JWT Advertising Agency

Shahrukh J Irani - Publicis Ambience Advertising Agency

D. Udaya Kumar - PhD scholar, IIT Mumbai

Shibin KK - Teacher, Government Higher Secondary School at Kerala

The symbol will be included in the “Unicode Standard” for representation and processing of text, written in major scripts of the world. The symbol will also be included in the Indian Standards, viz. 13194:1991 – Indian Script Code for Information Interchange (ISCII)for processing on computers along with the key-board lay outs.

After encoding of the symbol in the Unicode Standard and National Standard, NASSCOM will approach software development companies for incorporating the Rupee symbol in their operative software, as a new programme or as an update, to enable the computer users worldwide to use the symbol even if it is not embedded on the keyboards (in a similar manner, we use the Euro symbol, which is not embedded in the keyboards in use in India). All these process will take around 6- 18 months time.