While we waiti for those lines outside banks and ATMs to become a little more manageable these days lets take your mind off all that confusion with these facts about Indian currency?
Introduced in 1996, the Mahatma Gandhi series of notes were in ₹5, ₹10, ₹20, ₹50, ₹100, ₹500 and ₹1000 denominations. The security thread, latent image, micro lettering, intaglio print, fluorescent ink and optical fibre were some of the new features.
From 9 November, this series replaces the previous MG series for the ₹500 and ₹1000. This series will also have the Swachh Bharat logo, windowed security thread and see though register with denominational numeral.
It may buy you nothing except the cheapest toffee at the paan ki dukaan and beggars would laugh if you gave them this, but the 50 paise coin is still legal tender. It has undergone various transformations to assume its current small, lightweight avatar.
Never mind! Some of us will remember when five and ten paise coins could buy something and when the one and two paise coins would reside at the bottom of the ‘batwa’ mostly for nostaligia value. These were valid currency till 2011 when they were officially withdrawn.
The first Indian Rupees date back to the 16th century, to the time of Sher Shah Suri. Then named the Rupiya, it was continued by the Mughals as well.
It was perhaps easy to string together these coins with the hole in the centre; many countries had this coin currency feature; we colloquially called it the kani kaudi!
The RBI was set up in 1935 and first paper currency issued by RBI was a 5 rupee note bearing King George VI’s portrait.
We had a 10,000 rupee note till 1978 when it was demonetised by the then PM Morarji Desai along with the 5000 and 1000 rupee notes. This was also meant to turf out black money.
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