The dollar is $. The Euro is €. The pound is £. But the rupee was stranded without a symbol, until today.The Indian Press Information Bureau, for the first time, released images of the newly selected symbol. According to the Associated Press, ministers made the executive decision at a cabinet meeting after considering five finalist symbol options, all of which it was said, drew inspiration from “the letter R”” in the Roman alphabet and “Ra” from the ancient Devanagari script used in Hindi.
Formerly, the Rupee was indicated by abbreviations, hardly official enough for the currency of one of the world's fastest-growing economic forces. It prompted more than 3,000 design submissions to aid this cultural and historical event.
Udaya Kumar's design was ultimately the symbol chosen. Kumar, a post graduate student at the Indian Institute of Technology, now not only gets accolades for contributing to India's culture, but also will receive a cash prize of 250,000 rupees (now with symbol attached).
Indian Rupee Symbol – How to Type it?
Indian Rupee symbol has been announced and has been sent to the government for approval. And if you are wondering how will you type the rupee symbol using your keyboard, well it might take a year or so to get the symbol in action (to gain acceptance in India) and two years for international acceptance.
Technically speaking, the symbol will be first sent to Unicode Consortium’s technical committee, in order to include the same in Unicode database.
The symbol will also be included in the Indian Standards, viz. 13194:1991 – Indian Script Code for Information Interchange (ISCII), through an amendment to the existing list by the Bureau of Indian Standards. The ISCII specifies various codes for Indian languages for processing on computers along with the key-board lay outs.
While the Government of India can mandate hardware manufacturers to include the symbol in keyboards, it can also be accessed through assigned keyboard combination or via the operating system’s Character Map, post approval from the Unicode Consortium.
Maybe, to get the official Rupee symbol, you would have to wait for the new keyboards or hack from a typographer.
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