It has not changed again but has changed the reputation of India. We all know that change is good and consider it to be the only thing, which is constant.
What led to the making of this symbol that changed the identity of the Indian currency?
Who was the one who first had a thought that our country should have an identity for its currency?
It was indeed a brilliant insight for a developing country like India to have a symbol amongst developed countries like USA, Great Britain,
Japan etc.
It was Nondita Correa-Mehrotra (Architect) who had written an application to the RBI in August 2005. Although she did not get any response, the surprise came by when a competition was announced for the same on March 5th, 2009.

These are a few facts that most of us do not know. It was very surprising to know the number of entries that came in with varied designs. The entries accounted more than 25,000 designs and Nondita also had one of her designs too which was shortlisted for the final round which means she was one of the finalists. There were 4 more in the run namely Dharmalingam Udaya Kumar – IIT Bombay, Shahrukh J Irani (Creative Director) – Publicis Ambience, Shibin KK (Teacher) and Hitesh Padmashali (Creative Director) – jwt.

Guidelines:

Nondita Correa-Mehrotra
Architect

Nondita to begin with had an elegant symbol with no confusions in recognizing and adaptable to printing as well as handwriting. Nondita is the daughter of renowned architect Charles Correa. She is a Harvard University-trained architect and a lecturer of architectural design at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. With a marvelous educational and experienced background, she was confident of winning as her design had all the aspects covered.

Dharmalingam Udaya Kumar
IIT Bombay

Udaya was one of the other finalists who also had a design, which was simple, easy to write, and for a common man to understand. It was a challenge to design the symbol for the Rupee is what Udaya claims.
He is a typographer and devoted good time on the design, the finer details, visualizing the designs in various sizes. Udaya was good at art so he pursued a degree in Architecture and a Master's in Graphic Design. He has won several design competitions during his college days.
He worked as a designer for Intelligent Computing Chip magazine for two years. Later, he realized the need to focus on regional typography. Udaya Kumar, now is a member of the faculty at IIT-Guwahati.

Shahrukh J Irani,
Creative Director
Publicis Ambience

A finalist from the advertising world (a matter of pride and jealousy) for Shahrukh Irani designing the symbol for the Rupee was the most important project in his career (bigger than Cannes I must say). The idea was to make it simple, easy to write and at the same time have mass appeal, he added.
It took him a long time thinking about what would work well as he thought to himself that it is something that will be accepted as part of our lives so the process had to be checked thoroughly.
The design elements among all the five are common though the usage and visual effect are different. The importance of the symbol to be a part of the font has also been taken into consideration.

Shibin KK
Teacher

It was a matter of great pride for Shibin for the opportunity to design the symbol for the Indian Rupee. Shibin is a teacher at a government higher secondary school near Thalasserry in Kerala. He believes that all the short-listed are equally good. It took him a few days to create the design and he was delighted to know after 7-8 months that his design was selected. Having worked as a senior designer for companies in Bangalore, he has made hundreds of logos for companies. The experience helped him while making the design for the Rupee.

Hitesh Padmashali
Creative Director
jwt

The last finalist came again from the advertising industry. A second salutation (optional for us) as the finalist is from our own field. Designing the symbol took Hitesh just a few seconds (The advtg. blood effect). But he devoted time to do a lot of paperwork, basically the sketching out various forms of the designs (The award winning blood effect).
Hitesh’s design is simple and can be written easily. The existing keyboards can type the symbol of his design using a unicode (Advtg. Heads not only use USPs to create communications but also create them)
Designing has been his passion since childhood. His interest in music led him to designing cassette covers for personal use, since his school days. He also designed packages for jam bottles. Later, he focused on web-designing and designing logos. The experience certainly helped him during the design of the Rupee symbol.

Pause - Recollect - Now Read

After reading this, do you feel there should have been an interview in the news channels with the finalists to hear them speak about their creative insights? 25,000 entries, were they enough? What is the apt way to make people aware of such things? Moreover, did you know about these facts? May be yes or may be a big NO.
We as an advertising agency feel that we also wanted to participate and I bet most of the agencies all over Mumbai and across India would love to. It is a high-class accreditation that an Indian could grant her/his country. The degree of importance given to such a huge event by the government is unfortunate. One of the jury members not present at the time of the decision is shocking. There are a lot of screws that the government has to tighten and tighten them hard or we would start thinking that forget tightening them, they might have run out of screw drivers.
Nevertheless, India is the first developing country who now has a symbol for its currency and is the 5th country in the world with the US dollar, British pound-sterling, Euro and Japanese yen to have its own symbol that is recognizable worldwide. And for the people who still don’t know when the Rupee symbol came into being; it was July the 15th, 2010.
I am proud.

P.S: The most vital information is that the person who won was Mr. Dharmalingam Udaya Kumar (IIT-Mumbai) The symbol is derived from the Devanagari letter with an additional horizontal line. The parallel lines at the top (with white space between them) make an allusion to the tricolor and depict an equality sign, which symbolizes the nation's desire to reduce economic disparity. The Indian Rupee will have its own unique symbol, a mix of the Devanagri ‘Ra’ and the Roman capital ‘R’ without the stem. (We should congratulate him, right?)