India picks symbol to rival the €£¥$

For those of us still fumbling to find the € symbol on our keyboards, today was a bad news day. Computer and mobile keyboards in India (and possibly around the globe) will soon be adding another new button - the rupee key.

Yesterday a jury selected by the Indian government unveiled a new rupee symbol to rival the internationally recognized the US dollar ($), the euro (€), the UK pound (£) and the Japanese Yen (¥).

The decision to create a new currency symbol reflects India’s aspiration to become a global player on international financial markets, in particular at a time when the Indian rupee has been strengthening against all major currencies. The new symbol - or logo as some people have called it - also aims to distinguish India from its neighbors. Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka all currently use the “Rs” abbreviation to refer to the their local rupee.

Earlier this year Pranab Mukherjee, India’s finance minister, said that the government “intends to formalise a symbol for the Indian rupee, which reflects and captures the Indian ethos and culture”.

So, in classic Indian style, the ministry organized an open competition to design the new symbol. The prize set for the winner was Rs250,000 ($5,352) in cash. And the winner was … Udaya Kumar, a post-graduate student at Mumbai’s Industrial Design Center, which is part of one of India’s elite institutes of technology (IITs). For those who think it looks a bit like an ‘R’ with a line across it, don’t be fooled, the new symbol represents exactly what the finance minister was looking for.

“An amalgam of the Devanagari ‘Ra’ and the Roman capital ‘R’ without the stem…. [it] is based on the Tricolour and “arithmetic equivalence”. While the white space between the two horizontal lines gives the impression of the national flag with the Ashok Chakra, the two bold parallel lines stand for ‘equals to’, representing balance in the economy, both within and with other economies of the world.”