27 September 2010
On 5 March 2009 the Indian government announced a contest to create a sign for the Indian rupee.[2][3] During the Union Budget 2010, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee mentioned that the proposed sign would reflect and capture the Indian ethos and culture.[4] Five signs created by Nondita Correa-Mehrotra, Hitesh Padmashali, Shibin KK, Shahrukh J Irani, and D Udaya Kumar[5][6] had been short listed[6] from around 3331 responses received and one of them was to be finalized at the Union Cabinet meeting held on 24 June 2010.[7] The decision was deferred by a request of the Finance Minister,[4] and it was decided when they met again on 15 July 2010,[1] and selected the symbol created by D Udaya Kumar.[1][8] Design The new sign is a amalgam of the Devanagari letter "र" (ra) and the Latin capital letter "R" without its vertical bar (similar to the R rotunda). The parallel lines at the top (with white space between them) are said to make an allusion to the tricolor Indian flag[9]. Usage The Indian government will try to adopt the sign within six months in the country and globally within 18 to 24 months.[1] The Indian rupee sign is currently used in all leading newspapers, which can be seen in any price tag for products. Also various articles in papers where currency is to be used, this new sign is adopted instead of previous sign (Rs). Various new solutions for the usage of the Rupee Symbol have been also developed like WebRupee provides an API which facilitates the usage of the rupee symbol over the web. While Desktop users can download rupee font provided by Foradian Technologies. The old sign will still be used by other countries that use a Rupee, such as Sri Lanka, Pakistan,Nepal. On 10 August 2010 the Unicode Consortium UTC accepted the proposed code position U+20B9 INDIAN RUPEE SIGN (HTML: ₹).[10] The character is to be encoded and named distinctly from the existing character U+20A8 ₨ RUPEE SIGN (HTML: ₨), that will continue to be available as the generic rupee sign.
CAclubindia
