D UDAYA KUMAR : THE MAN BEHIND THE NEW SYMBOL FOR INDIAN RUPEE

The man who created the symbol for the Indian rupee is a single parent with 18 children, living on the IITBombay campus. Thirty-twoyear-old D Udaya Kumar, who has just submitted his PhD thesis and is poised to join IITGuwahati as an assistant professor next week, is as proud of his green babies as he is of giving India its currency sign.

Kumar’s symbol was chosen after a public competition among resident Indian citizens.
Over 3,000 entries were received. These were evaluated by a jury headed by the RBI deputy governor , which included experts from reputed art and design institutes.
"The entries were presented to the jury in such a manner that the identity of the competitors was not revealed to the jury members. The jury selected five final entries and also gave its evaluation of these five entries to the government," said I&B minister Ambika Soni.
Kumar’s symbol is an amalgam of the Devanagari ‘Ra’ and the Roman capital ‘R’ without the stem.
The four others were Jitiesh Padmashali (an advertising professional), Shahrukh J. Irani (a designer), Nondita Correa-Mehrotra (lecturer in architectural design at MIT and daughter of well-known architect Charles Correa) and Shibin K K, a Kerala teacher.
Born in Chennai on 10 October, 1978, Kumar’s family hails from Thanjavur. He studied architecture, which he pursued at Anna University in Chennai. Subsequently, he did his Masters in Architecture from IIT, Mumbai.
When the industrial design centre in the campus started offering a PhD, Kumar enrolled, and started work on the evolution of the Tamil script. The 31-year-old bachelor has also worked as a senior designer for two years with publisher Infomedia.
There are coconuts, jamuns, neem and what-haveyou, sowed and nursed by Udaya Kumar during his nineyear stay at Hostel 7 on the Powai campus of IIT-Bombay while pursuing his master’s and doctorate degree at Industrial Design Centre (IDC). The two predominant forces that drove him to apply at IITGuwahati, not the usual choice for most of his ilk, were the impressive sports stadium on the campus and the ‘‘beautiful’’ Brahmaputra river flowing alongside.
A vegetarian by choice, Udaya Kumar is also an accomplished gardener, a passionate nature lover, sports enthusiast, and fitness freak, all rolled into one compact package. Though he has superb organizational skills, he is softspoken to a fault, usually managing two and a half words per minute. On Thursday though, he outdid himself by repeating his rupee design story from afternoon to midnight, without a break, on TV channels of all hues. Displaying modesty even in his hour of glory, he does not make light of the prize money of Rs 2.5 lakh, as some advertizing experts did on TV channels. ‘‘Had I been working for a corporate, I would have made much more money but wouldn’t have earned a fraction of the honour,’’ he says.
The second of four children, Udaya Kumar was born to N Dharmalingam, a contractor, and Jayalakshmi in 1978 in Chennai. He credits his boarding school, La Chatelaine junior college, for making him a well-rounded person. ‘‘I spent almost half my life there — from Class I to XII. They laid the foundation for my interest in sports and design.’’
While doing his bachelor’s in architecture from Anna University, he designed posters and publications that helped him define his calling — visual design. ‘‘I realized Indian scripts don’t have their design repertoire. After two years of trying to create something new in Tamil typography, I realized that I shouldn’t work on my own. I needed expert guidance and hence, came to Industrial Design Centre at IITBombay,’’ he says.
Designing the simple-looking Indian rupee symbol did not come easy for Udaya Kumar. ‘‘I spent endless nights on trial and error. The symbol had to have universal design features while staying Indian in spirit,’’ he says. That explains the propensity of his symbol towards the Latin letter form, ‘R’ for rupee, and the stroke across the top curve, parallel to the ‘shirorekha’, the line heading the alphabet in Devanagari script. ‘‘Most international currencies have double strokes such as the Australian dollar, Korean yen, the Euro or the Lira. The feature pronounce its identity as a currency,’’ he says.