What is money?

“You can’t buy happiness through money, but there is a lot of other stuff that you can buy.”

People use the money to buy goods and services, and also to invest. Money has several denominations such as coins and rupee notes in India, dollar bills and cents in the United States of America. Every country has its currency. The United States currency is a dollar bill, Indian currency is ₹, and in the UK, the currency is Pound Sterling.

Each denomination has its significance that is considered during a trade.  For example: If you buy chocolate of 4$ in the US, the following will be the denomination:

This is a 1$ bill and if you use 4 of them, it will be 1$ + 1$ + 1$ + 1$ = 4$

Or you can also use a 5$ bill to spend on it.

Let’s take another instance in the Indian context:  You want to buy chocolate of INR 20, what can be the denominations?

There can be three ways to pay for it: You can use four coins of INR 5 or two notes of ₹10 or one single ₹20 bill.

The shapes, sizes, and colours of coins and rupee notes keep changing from time to time.

For example: In India, the ten, twenty, twenty-five and fifty paise are not in use anymore.

The ₹500 and ₹1000 that were in great use during 2016, aren’t of significance now. In this digital era, people prefer to keep their money in an account to use it through online platforms such as online banking, Google Pay, digital wallets such as Paytm, etc.

• The one rupee and two rupee notes as shown in the above picture are barely available now.
• INR 500 and 1000 aren’t in use after the Demonetization ( some currency notes were banned all of a sudden) in 2016.
• In 2019, following INR 500 and 2000 notes are in circulation and used in commerce and trade.

Facts about Indian rupee

• The Indian currency is issued and controlled by the RBI (the Reserve Bank of India)
• The current abbreviation of INR began in July 2010, before which the abbreviation ‘Rs.’ was in use.
• The ‘rupee’ originated from the Sanskrit word ‘raupya’ which means silver.
• D. Udaya Kumar created the ‘₹ ‘symbol on 15th July 2010.
• In Indian English, the use of million and billion for lakhs and crore isn’t quite common.
• In 1964, the aluminium coins were introduced for denominations up to 20 paise.
• The foreigners can’t import or export Indian rupees, while the Indian nationals can import and export up to INR 5000 at a time.