The Indian Rupee symbol will soon be found on computer keyboards; the symbol will be placed above the number 4, next to the US Dollar sign.
India’s Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (CDAC) spearheaded the idea, which has now been approved by the Bureau of Indian Standards and the Unicode Consortium in the USA.
Mahesh Kulkarni, an official at CDAC, said to Indian media that all original equipment manufacturers (OEM) – such as IBM, HP, and Microsoft – have now been notified to start production of keyboards with the Rupee symbol on them.
Kulkarni further said that the new keyboards could be available from the OEMs in “a matter of months” and that operating systems, such as Linux and Microsoft would also incorporate it.
"We are coming up with an enhanced version of the Indian language keyboard, which will have Indian numerals on it. We have almost completed it and we will be presenting the enhanced Indian version keyboard proposal to the Department of Information Technology. It will in turn submit it to BIS,” Kulkarni said.
An official from Microsoft commented that once the new symbol is integrated into the software, the new keyboards could be part of the next production cycle.
“Once integrated, a user of all applications like Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint among others would be able to use the symbol,” said the Microsoft official.
