The Crowdsourcing Blog

You guessed it, it was crowdsourced!

Until recently, India’s currency was represented with “Rs” (also used by Pakistan, Nepal and Sri Lanka). But facing rival economies and symbols like €, $ or £, India decided it was time to get their own symbol.

So they launched a competition open to everyone, with a prize of Rs250,000 ($5,352), and the following conditions:

- it should be applicable to the standard keyboard

- be in the national language script or a visual representation

- and should represent the historical and cultural ethos of the country.

Yesterday, a jury from the Indian government selected the winning entry, from Udaya Kumar, a post-graduate student at Mumbai’s Industrial Design Centre.

This is an event of huge proportions. From now on and for many years to come, this will be the official rupee symbol, in a country with a population of +1 billion. A symbol that will be present everyday of their life.

Back to the symbol, acordding to Kumar, cited by the Indian Express, the concept is “based on the Tricolour and arithmetic equivalence. While the white space between the two horizontal lines gives the impression of the national flag with the Ashok Chakra, the two bold parallel lines stand for ‘equals to’, representing balance in the economy, both within and with other economies of the world.”

Contests of this kind have been happening for other events for years now (like the olympics, etc), so it’s not exactly new. But if we call it crowdsourcing it suddently seems new!

While it isn’t new, we have to see the importance and the impact this particular competition will have on an entire country and economy, and maybe influence the way other competitions will take shape in the future.