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It has billionaires and big ambitions. Now India wants something that no global economic powerhouse should be without: an international symbol for its currency.
The hope is that the rupee sign will become as ubiquitous as the US dollar ($), or that instant emblem of the digital age, the @ symbol.
But how easy is it to launch a symbol on the international stage and land a coveted place on keyboards the world over?
It doesn't happen very often. One of the most recent symbols to make the leap, the for euro, had a long and difficult birth.
Before that, in 1971, the @ symbol was assigned an important international role, as the critical connector in e-mail addresses.
A 30-year-old computer programmer named Ray Tomlinson, looking for coding to send the first ever e-mail, surveyed the keyboard on his Model-33 Teletype and chose @ - which is apparently centuries old and has served various different functions - because it was unlikely to appear in a person's name.
Cultural icon?
The Indian government's search for the perfectly formed sign is via an open competition, which stipulates that entries "should represent the historical and cultural ethos of India."
It's the same route that Russia went down in the 1990s, in its search, so far unsuccessful, for a symbol to represent the rouble.
Jasmine Montgomery, of design consultancy FutureBrand, London, says Delhi's move shows it has realised the importance of country branding. But she warns that it can be a tricky thing to manage.
"If the Indian Government is looking for something that symbolises its culture, it must equally bear in mind its business audience," she says. "When you look at it from a business point of view, different things come into play. Monetary policy and the stability of the currency is very important.
"The currency symbol could be a powerful part of the country's brand iconography, a signal of stability and the fact that it is a player on the world stage."
However, she says while devising an international currency symbol is a "brilliant idea", the competition has been set up in the wrong way.
"The idea that the symbol should have some cultural significance is a difficult one," she says. "The dollar, for example, doesn't signify liberty and freedom - there is nothing recognisably American about it."
The origins of the dollar sign have fallen into obscurity. What is known is that the symbol is more recent than the name, which has references in Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Tempest.
One explanation - the most widespread - is that the dollar sign was derived from the Spanish peso. Another, is that the dollar sign has origins in a numeral "8", denoting pieces of eight.
Rigorous testing
Nowadays, designing new symbols involves rigorous testing, says Ms Montgomery.
"The Indian Government will have to consider very carefully how the symbol would be used in all its technical applications - how does it look on the web, blown up on posters, on mobile phones."
India would not want a symbol that looked bad when it was turned upside down, she says - "like someone's bottom," for example.
The European Commission believes it got it right with the euro symbol. Its website optimistically announces that the "success of the euro as a currency worldwide owes a small debt to the unique and memorable symbol supporting the euro notes and coins".
The official version is that it the symbol is "a combination of the Greek epsilon, as a sign of the weight of European civilisation, an E for Europe, and the parallel lines crossing through stand for the stability of the euro", and was designed by an anonymous team of four.
But a former chief graphic designer for the European Economic Community, Arthur Eisenmenger, has claimed that it was in fact he who created the symbol a quarter of a century before its unveiling in 1997.
Mr Eisenmenger, the acknowledged creator of the European flag, said in an interview some years ago, he drew the symbol "without much consideration."
"I wasn't thinking of the euro at the time, but just something that symbolised Europe," he said.
Complicated process
But while the European Commission takes satisfaction in the symbol, typeface designers say the launch was not well managed.
"The European Central Bank presented it as a logo. At the time, it hadn't considered the technical consequences of it being incorporated into the everyday graphic language, and how it would translate to, say, computers or mobile phones," says Jurgen Siebert, head of graphics software company FontShop in Berlin.
Getting a symbol onto the international scene can be a complicated and lengthy process, says Mr Siebert.
There are the questions about where the new character should be placed in the character table and where it should be placed on the keyboard. (Outside the country in question, it is most likely to be rendered through special coding with keyboard short-cuts.)
Then the operating systems of millions of computers would need to be upgraded, as would dozens and dozens of font sets.
When a computer stores a character, it stores it according to one of several different coding standards, (for example Ascii or Unicode). Any new character would need to be added to those standards, so that when a computer receives it, it knows how to render it to the screen.
Even after a decade, many people still do not use the euro sign. The BBC, for example, writes out "euro", partly because it may still be unfamiliar to some readers, and partly because many keyboards still do not feature the sign.
"When it's all about ease of use and speed, it doesn't make sense that the word euro is still being written out," says Mr Siebert.
While the Indian government has set few conditions for the design of the Rupee the Russian competition, launched in 1999 by a group of journalists and designers and backed by the Russian Central Bank, issued a number of guidelines.
* Simple graphics, strong and easy to write - a single symbol
* Even weight - not overloaded with strokes or have any minor unnecessary lines
* Width not exceeding that of a zero - so it can fit into columns for company reports and accounting
The favourites are reportedly designs based around the letter R, or its equivalent in Cyrillic script, P. One shows an R with two strokes across its spine, similar to the euro, and another has a P crossed by two diagonal lines.
Either would fit well into the existing suite of international currency symbols, but there is still no consensus on what Russia's economic badge of honour should be.
Could India beat them to it?
"It's going to take a very long time before it translates into something," says Sudeshna Sen, foreign editor of India's Economic Times. "But an open competition like this will be fun for the people."
BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | India seeks rupee status symbol
The hope is that the rupee sign will become as ubiquitous as the US dollar ($), or that instant emblem of the digital age, the @ symbol.
But how easy is it to launch a symbol on the international stage and land a coveted place on keyboards the world over?
It doesn't happen very often. One of the most recent symbols to make the leap, the for euro, had a long and difficult birth.
Before that, in 1971, the @ symbol was assigned an important international role, as the critical connector in e-mail addresses.
A 30-year-old computer programmer named Ray Tomlinson, looking for coding to send the first ever e-mail, surveyed the keyboard on his Model-33 Teletype and chose @ - which is apparently centuries old and has served various different functions - because it was unlikely to appear in a person's name.
Cultural icon?
The Indian government's search for the perfectly formed sign is via an open competition, which stipulates that entries "should represent the historical and cultural ethos of India."
It's the same route that Russia went down in the 1990s, in its search, so far unsuccessful, for a symbol to represent the rouble.
Jasmine Montgomery, of design consultancy FutureBrand, London, says Delhi's move shows it has realised the importance of country branding. But she warns that it can be a tricky thing to manage.
"If the Indian Government is looking for something that symbolises its culture, it must equally bear in mind its business audience," she says. "When you look at it from a business point of view, different things come into play. Monetary policy and the stability of the currency is very important.
"The currency symbol could be a powerful part of the country's brand iconography, a signal of stability and the fact that it is a player on the world stage."
However, she says while devising an international currency symbol is a "brilliant idea", the competition has been set up in the wrong way.
"The idea that the symbol should have some cultural significance is a difficult one," she says. "The dollar, for example, doesn't signify liberty and freedom - there is nothing recognisably American about it."
The origins of the dollar sign have fallen into obscurity. What is known is that the symbol is more recent than the name, which has references in Shakespeare's Macbeth and The Tempest.
One explanation - the most widespread - is that the dollar sign was derived from the Spanish peso. Another, is that the dollar sign has origins in a numeral "8", denoting pieces of eight.
Rigorous testing
Nowadays, designing new symbols involves rigorous testing, says Ms Montgomery.
"The Indian Government will have to consider very carefully how the symbol would be used in all its technical applications - how does it look on the web, blown up on posters, on mobile phones."
India would not want a symbol that looked bad when it was turned upside down, she says - "like someone's bottom," for example.
The European Commission believes it got it right with the euro symbol. Its website optimistically announces that the "success of the euro as a currency worldwide owes a small debt to the unique and memorable symbol supporting the euro notes and coins".
The official version is that it the symbol is "a combination of the Greek epsilon, as a sign of the weight of European civilisation, an E for Europe, and the parallel lines crossing through stand for the stability of the euro", and was designed by an anonymous team of four.
But a former chief graphic designer for the European Economic Community, Arthur Eisenmenger, has claimed that it was in fact he who created the symbol a quarter of a century before its unveiling in 1997.
Mr Eisenmenger, the acknowledged creator of the European flag, said in an interview some years ago, he drew the symbol "without much consideration."
"I wasn't thinking of the euro at the time, but just something that symbolised Europe," he said.
Complicated process
But while the European Commission takes satisfaction in the symbol, typeface designers say the launch was not well managed.
"The European Central Bank presented it as a logo. At the time, it hadn't considered the technical consequences of it being incorporated into the everyday graphic language, and how it would translate to, say, computers or mobile phones," says Jurgen Siebert, head of graphics software company FontShop in Berlin.
Getting a symbol onto the international scene can be a complicated and lengthy process, says Mr Siebert.
There are the questions about where the new character should be placed in the character table and where it should be placed on the keyboard. (Outside the country in question, it is most likely to be rendered through special coding with keyboard short-cuts.)
Then the operating systems of millions of computers would need to be upgraded, as would dozens and dozens of font sets.
When a computer stores a character, it stores it according to one of several different coding standards, (for example Ascii or Unicode). Any new character would need to be added to those standards, so that when a computer receives it, it knows how to render it to the screen.
Even after a decade, many people still do not use the euro sign. The BBC, for example, writes out "euro", partly because it may still be unfamiliar to some readers, and partly because many keyboards still do not feature the sign.
"When it's all about ease of use and speed, it doesn't make sense that the word euro is still being written out," says Mr Siebert.
While the Indian government has set few conditions for the design of the Rupee the Russian competition, launched in 1999 by a group of journalists and designers and backed by the Russian Central Bank, issued a number of guidelines.
* Simple graphics, strong and easy to write - a single symbol
* Even weight - not overloaded with strokes or have any minor unnecessary lines
* Width not exceeding that of a zero - so it can fit into columns for company reports and accounting
The favourites are reportedly designs based around the letter R, or its equivalent in Cyrillic script, P. One shows an R with two strokes across its spine, similar to the euro, and another has a P crossed by two diagonal lines.
Either would fit well into the existing suite of international currency symbols, but there is still no consensus on what Russia's economic badge of honour should be.
Could India beat them to it?
"It's going to take a very long time before it translates into something," says Sudeshna Sen, foreign editor of India's Economic Times. "But an open competition like this will be fun for the people."
BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | India seeks rupee status symbol
mark my words India will prematurely go bankrupt in less then a decade the way they spend while there slumdogs levels are increasing.
