July 2010-India got its currency symbol. To decide and design the symbol, a contest was held by the Indian Government. The contest was announced on 5th March, 2009 and the symbol was finalized out of about 3000 proposed symbols on 15th July, 2010.
The symbol is given by an IITian D Udaya Kumar. It comes from the Devanagari ‘र’ and Roman ‘R’. As per the contest guidelines, the symbol depicts the cultural heritage of India and includes a national script.
The Tidle/Grave Accent Key
A font with the Rupee symbol is available for download at Foradian. There is also another version of the same that includes all letters. Once you download the font, you can type it using the grave accent(`) symbol-the one just left of the #1 key.
Previously, Rs or Re was used to denote the Indian currency. A modification of Rs was used as a former symbol(can be found at Xe.com)
