New Symbol for the Indian Rupee

The cabinet meeting chaired by Prime Minister Dr. Manmohan Singh in New Delhi on 15 July 2010 approved of the new symbol for the Indian rupee. The new symbol was designed by D Uday Kumar, who has been selected as an assistant professor at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Guwahati. The symbol uses the Devanagri script which represents the Indianness of it as the top-line is quite unique and is not found in any other script. The Roman script 'R' is also apparent in the symbol in order to have an international appeal. The Indian rupee became the fifth currency after US dollar, European Union’s euro, Japan’s yen and UK’s pound to have a symbol. The Indian rupee would now be denoted as INR and would be used after getting encoded in ‘Unicode Standard’, ‘ISO/IEC 10646’ and ‘IS 13194’.