The Story of the ₹ Rupee Symbol

Before 2010, the Indian rupee had no symbol of its own — people wrote “Rs.” or “INR”. Today ₹ is on every price tag and in every font.

A national competition

In 2009 the Government of India held an open competition for a symbol. Thousands of entries were received, and a shortlist was reviewed by a jury. On 15 July 2010 the Union Cabinet approved the winning design by D. Udaya Kumar, then a postgraduate design student who went on to teach at IIT Guwahati.

What the shape means

• It blends the Devanagari letter र (ra) with the Latin capital R without its upright stroke.
• The two horizontal lines at the top evoke the Indian tricolour and are also read as an “equals” sign, standing for balance.

Into computers

The symbol was added to the Unicode standard as U+20B9, and appears in modern fonts and on Indian keyboards. On Windows with an English (India) keyboard, Ctrl+Alt+4 or AltGr+4 types ₹. You can also use Win+. → Symbols.

In Excel

Format cells → Currency → choose “₹ English (India)” to show amounts as ₹12,34,567.00 — see Indian number format in Excel.

Before 2010, the US dollar, British pound, euro and Japanese yen were among the few currencies with a widely used symbol; India joined that club with ₹.