Rupee ( in English) or Rupia ( in Hindi) is the currency throughout India. The rupee notes start from the five rupee bill. I have seen one rupee and two rupee bills too when I was a child, but now small denomination bills have been scrapped by the government and Reserve Bank of India.

Each bill invariably has a picture of Mahatma Gandhi on one side and the national emblem of India on the other. On each bill, the numerical value of the bank note is written in fifteen Indian languages! Isn’t that incredible? The bills are signed by the Reserve Bank of India’s governor and each bill carries his signature. The notes also have a silver lining called security thread, which makes them authentic. Its hard to copy this silver line. But cases of fraud and duplicate 500 bills have been reported many a times. There are ways to check the authenticity of the bill; you will see a green number when you hold the note flat, but it will have a blue color when you watch it from an angle. But Its better to ask the shopkeepers to give you 100 rupee notes instead of 500 bills.

One rupee can be divided into 100 paisas. But you won’t find one paisa, two paisa coins in India. Though they were in practice in pre-independence India. I have seen 10 paisa and twenty paisa coins, but now they not in the market anymore. Their production or minting ( as it is called in professional terms) stopped in late nineties. You will most easily find 50 paisa, one rupee, two rupee, and five rupee coins. You many also find twenty five paisa coins, but they are becoming rarer too. The coins usually had the national emblem on one side and the numerical value ( 10,20,50, 1/-,2/-) on the other side. Now it has been gradually replaced by the coins which have numerical value engraved on one side along with a cross and the national emblem of India on the other. There was much hue and cry form Hindu rightist party Bhartya Janta Party ( BJP), when these new coins were introduced recently. They claimed that it is the conspiracy of Congress President Sonia Gandhi to corrupt our culture. I don’t know how they got this idea. May be they don’t have any thing else to do than raising silly protests.

Earlier the coins were made of aluminium and copper, but now ferratic stainless steel is being used to manufacture them , making the coins light in weight.

Recently a website TrackGandhi has been launched to track the movement of Indian Rupee notes.