The Indian Government and the Unicode Consortium deserves to be praised for getting this through so quickly.

The new design for the Rupee currency symbol was approved in July this year and within a span of less than three months, the symbol has been made part of the official Unicode Standard.

The Unicode Consortium, the organization that is responsible for maintaining the Unicode Standard, today formally announced Unicode Version 6.0 which includes some 2000+ new characters and one among them is the official Rupee currency sign for India.

It may however take some time before you can type the Rupee sign in your documents just like the $ or € symbols as none of the major font families, except for DejaVu fonts, have been upgraded to support Unicode Standard version 6.0.0 yet. You can use this page to determine if any of the fonts installed on your machine are capable of rendering the new Rupee character.

Once the families are upgraded, you’ll be able to use the HTML code ₹ in your web pages to display the new Rupee symbol or by pressing the Alt key followed by 20B9 in word processors.

The Indian IT department had initially proposed that the character code U+0971 be assigned to the Indian Rupee sign, as the code was within the range of Devnagri characters, but the Unicode Consortium approved the code U+20B9 which is the same range that is used for other currency symbols like Euro, Franc and Peso.