A World Tour
Currencies
Our ₹ sign was designed by a student, and on one island people once paid with giant stone wheels taller than a grown-up! Let's explore the surprising story of money.
Did you know?
The ₹ sign was designed by D. Udaya Kumar, then a student at IIT Bombay. It was chosen on 15 July 2010. It mixes the Devanagari letter 'र' (ra) with the English letter 'R'.
On the island of Yap in the Pacific Ocean, people used giant stone discs called rai as money. The biggest one is about 3.6 metres wide and weighs about 4,000 kg!
The Reserve Bank of India issues our banknotes, except the ₹1 note, which is issued by the Government of India. All our coins are made by the Government too.
Try this: Swap Without Money
Play a barter (swapping) game with your family. Each person takes three small things, like a pencil, an eraser and a sticker. Now try to swap things to get what you want, without using any money. Was it easy? What happened when someone did not want what you had? This is one reason people started using money!
Go further: Money You Can't Carry
On Yap, rai stones were so heavy that they were rarely moved. Instead, everyone simply remembered who owned each stone. When a stone was given to someone new, its story changed, but the stone stayed in the same place! One stone even sank in the sea, yet people still treated it as owned. Money in a bank works a bit like this: the numbers change, but nobody carries the coins around.