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Money and Shopping in India


Money and Shopping in India

Rajasthani fabric for sale, Jodhpur
Rajasthani fabric for sale, Jodhpur
The currency in India is the Indian rupee (sign: ₹; code: INR) (रुपया ? rupaya in Hindi and similarly named in most Indian languages, but taka in Maithili and Taakaa in Bengali and Toka in Assamese). It trades around 47 rupees to the U.S. dollar, 67 to pound sterling and 61 rupees to the Euro. The rupee is subdivided into 100 paise (singular: paisa). 5 rupees 75 paise would normally be written as ₹5.75. The Rupee symbol "₹" was introduced in July 2010. Previously, "Rs" was used ("Re" for the singular rupee) and you might continue to see the previous nomenclature over the next few years as the new symbol is gradually adopted. Common bills come in denominations of ₹5 (green), ₹10 (orange), ₹20 (red), ₹50 (purple), ₹100 (blue), ₹500 (yellow) and ₹1,000 (pink). It is always good to have a number of small bills on hand, as merchants and drivers sometimes have no change. A useful technique is to keep small bills (₹10-50) in your wallet or in a pocket, and to keep larger bills separate. Then, it will not be obvious how much money you have. Many merchants will claim that they don't have change for a ₹100 or ₹500 note. This is often a lie so that they are not stuck with a large bill. It is best not to buy unless you have exact change. The coins in circulation are 50 paise, ₹1, ₹2, ₹5, and ₹10 (recently introduced). Coins are useful for buying tea (₹5), for bus fare (₹2 to ₹10), and for giving exact change for an auto-rickshaw. Indians commonly use lakh and crore for 100,000 and 10,000,000 respectively. Though these terms come from Sanskrit, they have been adopted so deeply into Indian English that most people are not aware that it is not standard in other English dialects. You may also find non-standard placement of commas while writing numerals. One crore rupees would be written as ₹1,00,00,000. This format may puzzle you till you start thinking in terms of lakhs and crores, after which it will seem natural.

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India Travel Guide from Wikitravel. Many thanks to all Wikitravel contributors. Text is available under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0, images are available under various licenses, see each image for details.

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