"Alex Plantema" <[email protected]> wrote: > Other countries have a currency named rupee as well. They keep using 20A8.
And this is exactly what the Indian governement wants to avoid: a confusion about which currency 20A8 represents. They want a unique character that will ONLY be interpreted as the INDIAN Rupee. And for that purpose, they designed a unique glyph, which should also have a unique encoding, forbidding any glyph variations that could represent another non-Indian rupee. This is important for pricing purposes, notably now with frequent cross-border trading, and list-pricing. It's true that in India itself, there are also several other Rupee signs (depending on the script), but this is certinaly causing confusion on India, because some of them are also shared by other nearby countries, with which India has very frequent trades, or simply in shops with cross-border visitors. May be India will decide that the official public list-pricings (in street shops/markets, or online) should ONLY use the new symbol, or on payment check forms, excluding all other symbols (except possibly the international ISO 639 symbol INR) for legal trading. It's curious that India did not even decide to rename its currency at the same time, to give it an even more unique identity. (That's what the European Union decided, to avoid the confusion with the previous multiple "basket currencies", like "ECU", adopting instead the term "Euro" which was never used in any past currency, but also because there still remains some "basket currencies", sometimes named "ECU" in private currency trading platforms, and which are not officially quoted but computed as weighted indexes between the Euro and other EU currencies which are still not in the EMU; note that even the ECB and the EU Commission defines such European currency index for statistical purposes only). Philippe.
