Rupee design could spawn a new business

MUMBAI: Worried about our weak currency? Scared about our soaring import bill? Hoping for some stimulus from the Ministry of Finance (MoF)? Sorry, can���t help with all that, but how about settling for a special currency symbol for the Indian rupee instead?
You can even help design it, though you don���t have much time. For something of such far reaching importance, the competition to design a new rupee symbol, which has been announced on the MoF���s website, hasn���t allowed much time.

Entries have to be sent, along with a bank draft of Rs 500/- ��� this is the finance ministry, so don���t expect anything free ��� to reach latest by 1300 hours on April 15, 2009.

Entries must be labelled ���Entry for Symbol for the Indian Rupee���, just to make sure it doesn���t go to some department for farm subsidies, and the design must ���represent the historical and cultural ethos of the country as widely accepted across the country.���

Once submitted, the design will be evaluated by a committee made of members from reputed art institutions, members of the Government of India and of the Reserve Bank of India (which, when we called while writing this piece, seemed quite in the dark about this project). The winner will get a generous prize of Rs 2,50,000, but the design copyright will rest with the Government of India.

The competition is already making waves abroad. The BBC commented on it, drawing parallels with Russia���s search for a new symbol for the rouble. The implication is that a currency symbol is itself symbolic of countries that want to project their confidence.

In the past, it was the Japanese who got the for the yen and the Koreans who got the for the won, so now it was the turn of oil and gas rich Russia, and service sector and Slumdog successful India to get their own currency symbols.

But a quick search for official currency symbols shows that there���s a big lag between choosing one and getting it used. We are familiar with the dollar���s $ and the pound���s ��, and perhaps we could guess at for the Thai bhat (those Bangkok holidays did teach us something), but how many would get for Israeli shekels or for Laotian Kips, and let���s not even try (Mongolian tugriks).

All these exist, as is proven by the fact that you can type them on your standard keyboard, with the help of a link like www.xe.com/symbols.php which lists currency symbols with their computer codes.

You just need to put Number Lock on and hold down the Alt key as you type the code on your computer���s numeric keypad. If you win the MoF���s competition, the government should then get your symbol certified by organisations like Unicode that set global standards for computers, and then your design is available across the world for posterity.



Which would be a kick except that the same listing of symbols shows that, apparently unknown, to the MoF there is already one for the Indian rupee. It looks like the standard Rs term currently in use, but with a horizontal stroke through the top half of the R. As is common with the symbols, there���s a modification for use in regular text, and that���s what you get when you type the code: .

From when this symbol dates is not clear, but numismatics expert Dr Shailendra Bhandare, curator of South Asian coins at the Ashomolean Museum at Oxford, says he���s seen something similar in the Foreign Department Correspondence at the National Archives of India while he was researching the coinage of the Princely States.

���The papers were all late 19th- early 20th century and the indexes were official Government publications. It is ���R��� with a horizontal stroke running through it at the intersection where the curve meets the stem,��� he says. The symbol was printed so it obviously had some formal value for a key type to have been made for it.

Dr Bhandare says he can���t remember if it had one or two stroke through the R, but if the latter would fit the trend started by the dollar. The origin of the two lines in the dollar is not clear, but one theory takes it back to the ���thaler��� issued by the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V.

His global empire included Spain, large chunks of the rest of Europe and must of South America, and the lines represented the Pillars of Hercules, the two mountains on either side of the Straits of Gibraltar at the empire���s heart. A S-shaped scroll in between them, with a slogan, became the dollar sign.

The two strokes were then taken, perhaps with subliminal suggestions of strength and stability, for other currency symbols like the yen, the won and above all, and most recently, the euro. In several cases, like the bhat, and the American dollar itself, they have been simplified down to one stroke.

According to the BBC report, the Russians have also considered using this for the rouble, but putting it on the letter P which in their Cyrillic alphabet stands for R. Presumably realising the confusion for non-Cyrillic users they have not formalised this, though it should be noted that doing so would leave R open for the rupee. (Although the plain capital R now stands for the South African rand).

Another tactic would be to use an entirely Indian symbol as the Israelis have done with the shekel, and is done with Iranian, Omani and Saudi Arabian rials. But this reduces the chances of the symbol being used outside the country; at some point respect for national usage gets overruled by unfamiliarity.



In India, there would be problems within the country itself. With multiple alphabets on our currency notes already, one can see how symbol based on just one Nagari letter would run into opposition from Tamil Nadu and other states.

The history of the rupee could be another source of inspiration. The term comes from the Sanskrit for silver, but actual usage comes from the era of Sher Shah Suri and the Mughals, when the first coins specifically identified rupees were struck, gold was used for mohurs and silver for rupees.

In both Western and Indian cultures, silver is commonly associated with the moon, for which the astrological symbol is the crescent half moon. Using the existing paragraph key would give us an easy way to type the symbol, as something like (R. It would also neatly link to the Islamic origin of the rupee, though this could pose political problems.

(Why did Islamic rulers take up a Sanskrit origin anyway? Dr Bhandare suggests it came from the terms used by money lenders in Bengal, where the early coins come from: ���It is also interesting that Bengal at this time was the only part of India to have had a substantial silver currency and for all of the 13-16th centuries.

It was based on the province���s trade links with China and most silver that got there was from Yunnan.��� So the rupee might even have some Chinese roots!)

Assuming this competition does hurdle all the problems of time, politics and other issues that might come in the way, the task before the finance ministry will be huge.

Not only will the new coding standard have to be pursued, computer peripheral manufacturers in India will have to be persuaded to put in special rupee keys, printers will have to strike the new font symbol, official documents will have to be written with new symbol and everyone from financial newspapers like ours to people doing business with the Indian government will have to start using it.

Such a vast enterprise will probably create lots of business and jobs for those implementing the change. Perhaps
there really is a stimulus plan after all, hidden inside this currency competition.