Indian rupee sign

It identifies the Indian rupee, not other currencies also called rupees. In standard price notation, write the symbol before the figure without a space, as in ₹500. Other countries like Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Mauritius also have currencies named rupee, but their money is not represented by ₹.

India's government held a nationwide public design competition in 2009 to replace generic text abbreviations like Rs and Re. D. Udaya Kumar's winning design was officially adopted by the Union Cabinet on 15 July 2010.

Because ₹ was introduced in 2010, the plain abbreviation Rs is still widely seen, and the older generic sign ₨ remains encoded in computing standards.

Why does the rupee symbol look like an R?

It combines the Devanagari consonant र (Ra) with the Latin capital letter R. The design is a deliberate blend of both scripts: Devanagari reflects India's domestic writing systems, while Roman R without its vertical stem links the mark to international financial notation.

The two parallel horizontal stripes across the top evoke the tricolour of the Indian national flag and echo an equals sign (=) used in monetary expressions.