Keyboards with rupee symbol to be rolled out from January 2012 | "Rupee Symbol" | Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) | Manufacturer's Association of Information Technology (MAIT)

Keyboards with rupee symbol to be rolled out from January 2012 | "Rupee Symbol" | Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) | Manufacturer's Association of Information Technology (MAIT)

Come January 2012 and the symbol of the Indian rupee will appear on computer keyboards in the same row where the numerals and symbols of other currencies, say dollar, exist.

"The symbol is being approved by the Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) and will be on the keyboards by January next year,” said N Ravi Shanker, additional secretary, department of information technology.

This would present a huge opportunity for the hardware players, especially with incremental sales coming from replacement of old keyboards.

“There is a big market for keyboard manufacturers as a direct result of the incorporation of the rupee symbol in keyboards. The significant strength exhibited by the Indian rupee in the recent months and continuous good performance of the Indian economy garner the need of the Indian rupee symbol in the keyboard,” said Anwar Shirpurwala, acting executive director, Manufacturer's Association of Information Technology (MAIT) . Read More

"Rupee Symbol" - New Indian Rupee symbol gets an official place on computer keyboards | Devanagari letter “र” (ra) ; Latin capital letter “R” | “Alt Gr” + “4”

"Rupee Symbol" - New Indian Rupee symbol gets an official place on computer keyboards | Devanagari letter “र” (ra) ; Latin capital letter “R” |  “Alt Gr” + “4”

The Indian government has announced that the new Rupee symbol has now been encoded into Unicode Standard and National Standard ISCII system and will also have a fixed location on the keyboard.

Although you cannot use it right away, the new rupee symbol can be generated in future by typing the keys “Alt Gr” + “4” (without the quotes).

The new rupee symbol (below), which is a combination of the Devanagari letter “र” (ra) and the Latin capital letter “R” was designed by D. Udaya Kumar, a design lecturer at IIT Guwahati and was selected through an open competition held across 2009-10. The winning symbol was approved by Indian union cabinet in July 2010 and a proposal was submitted to encode the Indian rupee sign into UCS and make it a computer standard. This proposal was accepted by Unicode Technical Committee, a non-profit organization that manages the development of the Unicode standard, a month later.

One of the direct implications of this move, which was undertaken to promote the usage of the new rupee symbol, would be that we may see wide adoption of this symbol across various software and keyboard manufacturers worldwide, since it is now a computer standard. Read More