Dharmalingam Udaya Kumar was booked to fly to Guwahati on Thursday morning. On Friday he was to start his new job as assistant professor in the department of design at the Indian Institute of Technology in Guwahati. He was leaving the IIT Mumbai campus where he spent five years earning a PhD in industrial design—the first doctorate to be awarded in the discipline in India.
The calls started pouring in early Thursday morning. He had won a nationwide contest run by the government to design a symbol for the Indian rupee. A symbol he designed, incorporating elements of Devanagari and Roman scripts, had been chosen to represent India’s growing economy and its currency. It would be incorporated in Unicode, computer keyboards will have a dedicated key for the symbol and it will come to be seen and recognised around the world. A designer gets to create a currency symbol just once in a nation’s life.
But there are no plans to introduce the symbol in new currency notes immediately.
"There will be no change (in currency notes) overnight. It will be a long drawn process," a senior Reserve Bank of Indian (RBI) official told HT.
"My design is based on the tricolour with two lines at the top and white space in between. I wanted the symbol for the rupee to represent the Indian flag," said Kumar.
The new symbol had been designed keeping in mind the ease with which it can be incorporated into the existing software systems.
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