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Hours after the Tamil Nadu government released a new rupee logo for the state budget, IIT Guwahati Professor D Udaya Kumar, who had designed the Indian rupee symbol, on Thursday, refused to be drawn into the controversy over language and said it is a mere coincidence that his father was a Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam MLA.
The DMK government in the southern state has replaced the Devanagari rupee symbol with a Tamil letter in its logo for the budget 2025-26, which will be tabled in the assembly on Friday.
While the move drew the ire of the Bharatiya Janata Party, the ruling party wondered if any rule barred such a depiction.
"I don't have any reaction. It's the government which suddenly felt that there was a need for a change and they wanted to implement their own script. This is up to the state government. So, I don't have anything to say about that. It's entirely up to the government," Kumar told PTI.
Kumar's father N Dharmalingam was an MLA from the Rishivandiyam constituency in 1971 from the DMK party, which is in power in Tamil Nadu presently.
"My father was an MLA even before I was born. Now, he is old and living in our village, leading his life peacefully. It just happened to be a coincidence, probably I could have been somebody else as well," the professor said.
"It's just that he happened to be a DMK MLA and the DMK government changed the design. I do not see anything else beyond it as a pure coincidence which has happened," he said.
The logo for the state budget, released by the Tamil Nadu government on Thursday, carried ru, the first letter of the Tamil word Rubaai which denotes the Indian currency in the vernacular language.
The logo also had the caption "everything for all," indicating what the ruling DMK claims is its inclusive governance model.
Recollecting his experience while designing the Indian rupee symbol, Kumar said, "The design I created was based on certain requirements that the government had asked for. It was a competition by the Government of India. I participated and my design got selected as the winner of the competition, and it was implemented then."
The Tamil Nadu government probably thought that it was the right time for them to change it with their own design, "and I don't have much to say on this", Kumar said.
According to the government portal 'www.knowindia.india.gov.in', the rupee symbol is an amalgam of Devanagari Ra and the Roman Capital "R" with two parallel horizontal stripes running at the top representing the national flag and also the "equal to" sign.
"The Indian Rupee sign was adopted by the government of India on July 15 2010," it added.
Udaya Kumar is a post-graduate in design from the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.