The India Rupya

There are certain things that are needed in order for other things to function properly. A toy car needs a key, a bottle needs a cap, a container needs a lid, a pencil needs lead and the list goes on. These are just the small and little things that persist however they still need something else to work.

Different shapes of silver coins ; Source : ClearIAS

Moving further up on the scale of things that are dependent on other things to function properly, we come to our country. India functions with the help of a lot of things as a country. A lot of things need to be in order for the country to work. However, there are not many things that the country cannot work with. Not just India, but there are things without which, no country can function properly.

One such thing that holds the utmost importance is the currency of the country. From the historic times, even before the country got its independence, India has had persistent currency in some form of the other. India has been functioning with its currency which has proven out to be really helpful at times.

The currency leading a country like India is the Indian Rupee. However, there have been times when the rupee wasn’t yet introduced. It was the barter system that was operational in those times. Not only that, but payments were done with shells, grains, food as well as many other things that the people could exchange for other things.

The rupee was introduced as a currency much later, in the 6th century BC. Thinking about how weird of a word; ‘rupee’, it came from the Sanskrit word ‘raupya’ which means silver and ‘rupya’, which meant a shaped and impressed coin. The reason that rupee was taken to be from the Sanskrit words was because in the initial stage the currency was in the form of coins made of silver.

In the 6th century BC, coins were used however they were shapeless and made mostly of silver with impressions of flowers, animals and sometimes religious symbols. The time when coins started taking their shapes was between the 4th and the 2nd century. It was in this time that the Indian currency coins gained their physical shapes into squares, circles and rectangles.

It can be said that the currency of India was one of the very few things that didn’t get disrupted between all the incidents of the British coming over and ruling India, all the way to India gaining independence and getting a government later.

In the year 1835, a coinage act was established that gave the country a uniformed form of coins. The currency was then converted to being paper based after the paper currency act of 1861.

Finally, the Reserve bank of India was established in 1935 and since then has been responsible for the management of the currency of the country.

It has been the currency that is one of the biggest factors of India working efficiently and making its way up the ladder of being a developing as well as a developed country.

Irregular shaped coins with symbols imprinted ; Source : Wikimedia Commons