Like the American dollar and British pound sterling, the new symbol of Indian rupee will also be available in the computers by merely downloading a software provided free by the government.

The Rupee symbol can be downloaded from http://tdil-dc.in/ and typed by pressing 'Alt Gr' together with '4'.

The software, released by TDIL Datacentre,  has been developed by Unicode Consortium and ISO within three months of selection the rupee symbol.

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"In order to promote the new symbol of Rupee, the same has been encoded in Unicode Standard and National Standard ISCII," the finance ministry said in a statement on Friday.

The symbol has been incorporated as UNICODE standard, which specifies the representation of text in all modern software products and standards.

Regarding the placement of the sign on the keyboard, a consensus was arrived among the stakeholders to use combination of 'AltGr' and numeral '4' for typing the symbol, it said.

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Microsoft has also released an update to support the new currency symbol for the Indian Rupee in Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008, Windows 7 and in Windows Server 2008 R2.

It is available on http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2496898.

Technology Development for Indian Languages (TDIL) programme is an initiative of Ministry of Communications and Information Technology.

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The initiative comes exactly a year after India joined an elite club of countries to have a distinctive symbol for its currency.

The Rupee symbol -- a blend of the Devanagri 'Ra' and Roman 'R' -- was selected after a long process of screening.

It was designed by IIT Bombay post-graduate D Udaya Kumar and was approved by the government in July last year.