The missing Rupee

The Reserve Bank of India's press release of the monetary policy statement on Tuesday had one interesting omission - the rupee symbol. Throughout the eight-page release, the rupee font was denoted by a single open-quote mark ('). Consequently, there were several sentences that read like this: "a 21-day term deposit of '500 billion was conducted on March 14 and 7-day term repo of '100 billion on March 19 and 26". A software glitch on the central bank's computers possibly since the release made no mistake with the dollar sign. But it can almost be considered a comment on the role foreign currency plays in our financial markets.

RBI clarifies

In response to “The missing rupee” (Chinese Whisper, April 2), the Reserve Bank of India has clarified that the missing rupee symbol in its monetary policy press release was not the result of a glitch in the central bank’s computers. According to a notification of Department of Electronics & Information Technology, Ministry of Communication and Information Technology, Government of India, Indian Language Technology Proliferation and Deployment Centre, the rupee symbol has to be downloaded separately by the user computers to be able to “read” the symbol. The url for this is: http://tdildc.in/index.php?option=com_updownload&view=download&domain