We all have been eagerly waiting for the Rupee Symbol to be finalized. It was supposed to happen in last week of June, but for some reason the Rupee symbol has not been finalized out of the 5 shortlisted ones.
However, there is a Shocking story behind how the 5 symbols were shortlisted, which was revealed after an RTI application was filed by Mr. Rakesh Kumar Singh. He left a comment on one of our earlier posts giving details of the same. The RTI Application is in Hindi (given below)
Here is the first shocker – There were total of 3331 entries that came in from the design competition announced by Indian Government. The jurors took only 17 hours to go through all the 3331 designs, which means roughly 18 seconds per design were given.
The 5 shortlisted symbols are not bad, but they are not good enough when you consider that over 3300 designs were received.
Here is another thing, the person, Ms. Nondita Correa-Mehrotra, who had given the suggestion to go in for this competition is one of the 5 rupee symbol shortlisted candidates.
The RTI query also clearly shows that the procedure was not at all transparent – It was not video-graphed, which now-a-days is a norm for all such government decisions. Additionally, whole jury was not present during the rupee symbol presentations.
It is really a shame that our Government Babu’s have made shambles of such a symbolic & prestigious task.
The RTI filing reply as given by Mr. Rakesh Kumar Singh (Hindi) – You can also go to save Indian Rupee Symbol for more details