Background

The word Rupee is derived from the Sanskrit word रौप्य (raupya) and many Indian languages use this root and do little variation in using this word like in रुपये (rupaye) Marathi, રૂપિયો (rupiyo) in Gujarati and so on. There was no standard symbol at National level for representing the rupee. And also Indian economy is expanding at a sustained high growth rate. Its economy is steadily integrating with the global economy and India has emerged as major investment destination worldwide. In view of this fact Government of India decided to have a distinct and unique symbol for Indian Rupee like major other currencies such as US Dollar($) or British Pound Sterling (£) and Euro (€). So on March 5, 2009 the Indian Government announced a contest to create a symbol for the rupee and after following a defined process, government of India selected the design created by Mr. D. Udaya Kumar from IIT Guwahati as the “Symbol for Indian Rupee (  )”. This symbol was selected out of 3000 entries and combines features of Devanagari and Roman scripts. Government of India approved the symbol on July 15th, 2010. Recently GoI has released new series of coins with this new rupee symbol.

Efforts of Govt. of India

With the sustained efforts of Government of India, Unicode Consortium and ISO have accepted the proposal of GoI and it has been encoded at code position U+20B9 in Unicode version 6.0 and ISO-10646 Standard. Bureau of Indian Standards (BIS) has also done amendment of Indian Rupee Symbol in IS 13194:1991 (ISCII) standard.

For finalizing the representation of Rupee Symbol in the INSCRIPT Keyboard layout and the Qwerty Keyboard, Department of Electronics and Information Technology (DeitY) took initiative to call all major stakeholders including OS Developers, PC manufacturers, Keyboard manufacturers, Printer and terminal manufacturer on a single platform in collaboration with MAIT. All the stakeholders agreed unanimously on using ‘AltGr’ + ‘4’ for implementation of Rupee Sign. Some of PC manufacturers like Lenovo India Pvt. Ltd. have already implemented the incorporation of Indian Rupee Symbol as stipulated in the BIS guidelines. 
Technology Development for Indian Languages Programme (TDIL), DeitY along with CDAC, has also drafted the guidelines for Font Design of Indian Rupee Symbol and the same is available for feedback on http://tdil-dc.in/ .

How to type Rupee Symbol

TDIL has released a tool to type Rupee Symbol along with updated “SakalBharati” font. Sakal Bharati is a Unicode based Open Type font which includes 11 scripts in one font i.e. Assamese, Bengali, Devanagari, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Oriya, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil and Urdu. It has used Mono thick (Equal thickness of horizontal stems and vertical stem) glyphs for all scripts. This tool enables user to type Rupee Symbol in users documents using ALTGr + 4 combination on QWERTY keyboard and it is available on http://tdil-dc.in/.
Microsoft has also released an update to support the new currency symbol for the Indian Rupee in Windows Vista, in Windows Server 2008, in Windows 7 and in Windows Server 2008 R2, it is available on http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2496898. Similarly RedHat also released a package which is available on https://rhn.redhat.com/errata/RHEA-2011-0203.html. Now with the completion of standardization process in Unicode, ISO and Keyboard, it is now for ICT hardware and software manufacturers to launch their integrated solutions for the ease and widespread usage of New Indian Rupee Symbol.

At Last

With sustained efforts of various departments of GoI, Indian Rupee symbol shines and stands shoulder to shoulder with other world currency symbols signifying bold India seeking out its rightful place in the world.