3-language policy row: In a first, Tamil Nadu drops '₹' symbol from state Budget amid NEP stir

The Tamil Nadu government on Thursday dropped the official rupee (₹) symbol from the state's budget for 2025-26. Instead, it has adopted ‘ரூ', Tamil script for 'ru' for the state budget's logo. 'ru' is derived 'rubai', which means rupees in Tamil. 

This is the first time any state has rejected the national currency symbol. Tamil Nadu Chief Minister MK Stalin took to X to share a teaser of the state budget: "To ensure the widespread development of Tamil Nadu to benefit all sections of the society..."

In the previous two budgets, the southern state had used the rupee (₹) symbol for its logos. Even the 2023-24 budget logo, which was designed by an IIT-Guwahati professor, showed the symbol prominently. 

Interestingly, the official Indian rupee symbol (₹) was designed by Udaya Kumar Dharmalingam in 2010, an academic and a designer hailing from Tamil Nadu's Kallakurichi.

The design is based on the Devanagari letter (र) with a double horizontal line at the top and the Latin capital letter (R) without its vertical bar. Before adopting this symbol, the most commonly used symbols for Rupee were Rs., Re or in texts in Indian languages, an appropriate abbreviation in the language used.

The symbol was officially adopted by the Government of India in July of the same year. Udaya Kumar was studying visual design at IIT Bombay's Industrial Design Centre when the ₹ symbol was adopted. 

His father Dharmalingam was associated with the ruling Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) and was an ardent follower of the party's ideology. The development comes amidst the MK Stalin-led state government's resistance against the National Education Policy (NEP), 2020 and the three-language policy.

Under the three-language policy, government school students at the primary level are required to learn an Indian language along with English and Tamil. At the secondary level, they can also learn foreign languages such as Korean, Japanese, French, German, and Spanish in addition to Indian languages and English.