Indian Rupee
Currency

Overview

India has retained its reputation of having the earliest coins of mankind. The Indian rupee is well-established currencies and the importance is known world wide as Nepal and Bhutan peg their currencies with the Indian rupee. It is also a legal tender in Bhutan.

Rupee is the official currency and is derived from the work ‘rupyakam’ that means silver coin in Sanskrit language. It is denoted as Rs, Rp or RP. The unit of one currency= 100 paise.

The currency code is INR and the numeric code is 356 as per ISO standards. Indian rupee has an individual number system and large values are counted as hundred, thousand, million and billion respectively. This number system is popular among Nepal, Pakistan, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Myanmar.

Initially, the rupee coins were in silver , but after the discovery of large silver mines in the United States and other parts of European continent, the silver value declined in comparison to gold for which many other strong economies had strong base. Owing to this, the Indian rupee value declined.

Symbol

In 2009, March 5, the government of India created a symbol for rupee. This symbol is a combination of the English letter R and the Devanagari letter. The parallel lines on the top are allusion to the tricolor and depict equality sign symbolizing the desire of the nation to decrease economic disparity.

The earlier used symbols were in Indian language.

International use

The Pakistani rupee was into existence owing to the partition and in the starting Indian coins and currency notes were over-stamped with ‘Pakistan’.

The Indian rupee was official currency for countries such as Oman, Qatar, Aden, Kuwait, Kenya, Bahrain, Uganda, Tanganyika, Mauritius and the Seychelles.

The Indian government established Gulf rupee for exclusive circulation outside the country as an Indian rupee replacement on 1 May, 1959. This separate currency creation was done with RBI in the aim of reducing the strain on India’s foreign reserves owing to gold smuggling.

On June 6, 1966 India devalued the rupee and countries such as Qatar, Oman and the UAE introduced their own currencies replacing the Gulf rupee. Bahrain and Kuwait also replaced the Indian rupee in 1961 and 1965.

Exchange Rates

The exchange rates per Indian rupee in 2009 was U.S.dollar 48.84995, Canadian dollar 42.92026, Euro 68.03312, Pound sterling 76.38023, Swiss franc 45.05846, Australian dollar 38.58082, Japanese Yen 0.52239 and Singapore dollar33.60388.