Indian Rupee Symbol

The Indian rupee is the official currency of India. The issuance of the currency is controlled by the Reserve Bank of India.

The modern rupee is subdivided into 100 paise (singular paisa). The coins have a nominal value of 5, 10, 20, 25 and 50 paise as well as 1, 2, 5 and 10 rupee. The banknotes are available in a nominal value of 5, 10, 20, 50, 100, 500 and 1000 rupee.

In July 2010, the Indian Cabinet selected a new symbol for the Indian rupee (). It is an amalgam of Devanagari "र" (Ra) and the Roman "R" without the stem.

The design of the new symbol is by Udaya Kumar, a student of the Industrial Design Centre (IDC) at the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (IITB). It is a blend of Indian and Roman letters — capital 'R' and Devanagri 'Ra' which represents rupaiah, to appeal to international and Indian audiences. The design is based on the tricolour of the Indian Flag, with two lines at the top and white space in between.

Unlike other currency symbols like the Dollar or the Euro, you can’t however type the Rupee symbol using the standard Roman keyboard as the Unicode Consortium has not assigned a unique (ASCII) code to this new Rupee symbol yet but there are some free fonts that include this symbol already.

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.


Students make a formation of the new symbol of the Indian rupee at a school