Soon after the Indian government announced that a new symbol has been adopted for the India Rupee, a host of companies are in the race to cash in on the new symbol.  

The government has said that it will take about two years to put the symbol on the keyboards. Meanwhile, companies are racing to be the first to make the symbol available to the common public on their PCs.

The symbol is a letter from the devanagari script and has a hidden meaning. The symbol refers to the tricolour Indian flag and also depicts the equality sign that represents India’s desire to reduce economic inequality.

A Mangalore based company; Foradian Technologies Pvt Ltd has released a font called ‘Rupee_Foradian’ which will allow users to type in the rupee symbol. The font is available for free from the company website.

The company has also offered instructions on how to use the symbol for various applications including MS Excel, Lotus Notes, Silverlight, Blend and Visual Studio. The font is also available for Linux and Mac users.

The symbol will give a new face to the India currency and will also separate its identity from the currencies of neighboring countries like Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka that also use different types of Rupees. The government's adopted symbol for the currency is artistically exceptional and keyboard-efficient.

The new symbol will be included in the Unicode standard and in major scripts of the world so that it appears in electronic and print media. With the new symbol, Rupee joins the elite club of currencies like US Dollar, British Pound, Japanese Yen and the Euro that have a distinctive symbol.

The symbol is classy and reflects the culture of the country but the currency still needs to advance in some areas to stand against other currencies in the world. The India Rupee is not freely convertible and is also not taken as a reserve currency. The country needs to reduce poverty so as to mark its arrival on the global stage.