Rupee symbol creator Udaya Kumar on Tamil Nadu's 'Rs' row: 'Don’t have any reaction'

IIT Guwahati Professor D Udaya Kumar had designed the Indian rupee symbol

After a row erupted over the Tamil Nadu government dropping the Devanagari rupee symbol and replacing the sign with the Tamil letter "Ru" in promotional material for its state budget, Professor D Udaya Kumar, who had designed the Indian rupee symbol, refused to be drawn into the controversy.

“I don’t have any reaction. It’s the Government which suddenly felt that there was a need for a change, and they wanted to implement their own script. This is up to the state government. So, I don’t have anything to say about that. It’s entirely up to the Government,” Kumar told PTI.

He also called it a mere coincidence that he happened to be a (former) DMK MLA's son. “My father was an MLA even before I was born. Now, he is old and living in our village, leading his life peacefully. It just happened to be a coincidence, probably I could have been somebody else as well,” he said.

The logo for the state budget, released by the Tamil Nadu government on Thursday, carried ‘ரூ’, the first letter of the Tamil word ‘Rubaai’ which denotes the Indian currency in the language.

Kumar, who originally hails from Thanjavur, is an IIT Mumbai post-graduate. He was a day away from starting his new job in the design department at IIT Guwahati when he came to know that he had won a national contest to design the symbol for the rupee that was selected from among hundreds of entries.

Recollecting his experience while designing the Indian rupee symbol, Kumar said, “The design I created was based on certain requirements that the government had asked for. It was a competition by the Government of India. I participated and my design got selected as the winner of the competition, and it was implemented then.”

The rupee symbol was approved by the UPA government in 2010.

What did BJP say?

K Annamalai, BJP's Tamil Nadu chief, lashed out at the DMK-led state government on Thursday.

"The DMK government's state budget for 2025-26 replaces the Rupee Symbol designed by a Tamilian, which was adopted by the whole of Bharat and incorporated into our Currency. Thiru Udhay Kumar, who designed the symbol, is the son of a former DMK MLA. How stupid can you become, Thiru @mkstalin?" he wrote on X.