Indian Rupee (INR)

About the Indian Rupee

The Indian Rupee (INR) is the official currency of India, issued by the Reserve Bank of India and written with the symbol ₹. One rupee is divided into 100 paise, though coins below 50 paise were withdrawn from circulation on 30 June 2011 and are no longer legal tender. Banknotes are a liability of the central bank, which holds the sole right of note issue, while coins and the ₹1 note are issued by the Government of India. ISO 4217 also lists the rupee as a currency of neighbouring Bhutan.

India moved to a market-determined exchange rate on 1 March 1993, when a unified market-based system replaced the Liberalised Exchange Rate Management System. The Reserve Bank of India describes its exchange-rate policy as focused on ensuring orderly conditions in the foreign exchange market: it intervenes by buying or selling foreign currency to curb excessive volatility, without committing to a target level or band. The rupee had earlier been pegged to the pound sterling, a link ended in September 1975 in favour of a basket arrangement.

The rupee takes its name from the rupiya, a 178-grain silver coin struck by Sher Shah Suri between 1540 and 1545 that the Reserve Bank's Monetary Museum describes as the precursor of the modern rupee. The Reserve Bank of India, established on 1 April 1935 under the Reserve Bank of India Act, 1934, and nationalised in 1949, issues the currency today. India decimalised on 1 April 1957, dividing the rupee into 100 paise in place of 16 annas or 64 pice; the coins were marked naye paise until 1964.

Average daily turnover in the rupee reached about US$185 billion in April 2025 — 1.9 per cent of global over-the-counter foreign-exchange turnover, the eleventh-largest share of any currency — according to the Bank for International Settlements' 2025 Triennial Central Bank Survey. That was up from US$119 billion and a 1.6 per cent share in the 2022 survey, and the US dollar–rupee pair alone accounted for around US$181 billion of the daily total.

Banknotes of the Mahatma Gandhi (New) Series, introduced from November 2016, are issued in denominations from ₹10 to ₹500, and circulating coins run from 50 paise to ₹20, minted by the Government of India under the Coinage Act, 2011. The ₹2000 note was withdrawn from circulation from 19 May 2023 but remains legal tender. The ₹ symbol combines the Devanagari letter Ra with the Latin capital R and was approved by the Union Cabinet on 15 July 2010 after a nationwide public design competition.