The story of the rupee
“Rupya” is how hundreds of millions of people say the name of their money. The word is older than any note in your wallet.
Where the word comes from
Rupee descends from the Sanskrit rūpya, meaning wrought silver or a coin stamped with an image. The Hindi रुपया (rupya or rupaya) is the everyday form, and related words name the currencies of Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Mauritius, Seychelles and Indonesia.
Sher Shah’s silver coin
The rupee as a standard coin dates to Sher Shah Suri, who ruled northern India from 1540 to 1545. He issued a silver rupiya weighing 178 grains, about 11.5 grams, alongside copper and gold coins in fixed relation to it. The Mughals kept the standard, and it survived for centuries under successive rulers and the East India Company.
Annas, pice and pies
Until the 1950s the rupee was not decimal. One rupee was 16 annas, each anna was 4 pice, and each pice was 3 pies, giving 192 pies to the rupee. Phrases such as “solah aane sach”, sixteen annas true, meaning completely true, survive from that system.
Paper money and the Reserve Bank
Private and presidency banks issued the first notes in the late 1700s and 1800s. The Government of India took over note issue in 1861. The Reserve Bank of India began operations on 1 April 1935 and has issued banknotes since. One exception remains: the one-rupee note is issued by the Government of India and signed by the Finance Secretary, while all higher notes carry the signature of the RBI Governor.
Going decimal
In 1957 India adopted the decimal system: one rupee became 100 naye paise, “new paise”. The word “naye” was dropped in 1964. Coins below 50 paise have since been withdrawn from use as prices rose.
The ₹ symbol
For most of its history the rupee was written as Rs or Re. On 15 July 2010 the government adopted the ₹ sign, designed by D. Udaya Kumar and chosen through a public competition. It blends the Devanagari letter र with the Roman R, and its parallel lines echo the tricolour and an equals sign.
The notes in your hand
Every banknote states its value in 17 languages: Hindi and English on the front and 15 others in the language panel on the back. In November 2016 the ₹500 and ₹1,000 notes then in use were withdrawn as legal tender and a new series was introduced. The ₹2,000 note from that series was itself withdrawn from circulation from 2023.
The digital rupee
Most rupees today never exist as paper. They move as bank entries through UPI, cards and transfers. The Reserve Bank has also been piloting a central bank digital currency, the e-rupee, which is a digital form of cash issued by the central bank itself.
About the name of this site
Rupya.com uses “rupya” in its ordinary, descriptive sense: the common word for the rupee. The site is independent and has no connection with the Reserve Bank of India, the Government of India or any payment brand. See our disclosure.