Rupees: Where they’re used.
Rupees are used mostly in India today, although the are used in other countries also, with maybe a slightly different name. Some examples are: the Indonesian rupiah, the Maldivian rufiyaa, and the Sri Lankan rupee. It was originally a a silver coin weighing about eleven and a half grams.
Being a silver based currency, the rupee in India suffered in value during the 19th century when vast amounts of silver were discovered in America and Europe. This changed the relative value of silver to gold dramatically, and suddenly India’s currency bought less in the international market. This is event is referred to as “the fall of the rupee.”
Since the time of its independence in 1947, has suffered a couple of serious devaluations of the rupee. The first was in 1966 when foreign aid was cut off, and India was told that it must reform its restrictions on trade before the foreign aid would again become available. Also the Indo-Pakistani was of 1965 resulted in the United States withdrawal of foreign aid.
The second financial crisis which resulted in further devaluation of the rupee was in the 1990s. Its foreign exchange reserves had decreased so much that India barely had enough for three weeks of import. Once again India faced high inflation and huge budget deficits. As a result, the Indian government was forced to devalue its currency. Finally, beginning at the millennium, the rupee started stabilizing. Today the rupee has a value of 48.88 to one US dollar.
The name for the Indonesian rupiah was derived from the Indian rupee. It currently consists of coins from 25-1000 rupiah, and banknotes from 1000-100,000 rupiah. Roughly translated to US dollars, the largest Indonesian banknote is worth about 10 dollars. The rupiah was internationally recognized in 1950 as the official currency of Indonesia. Since that time, the rupiah has been subject to high inflation for most of its existence. In December of 2008, one US dollar was worth approximately 10,800 rupiah.
The Maldivian rufiyaa is subdivided in 100 laari. Coins range in value from 1 laari to 2 rufiyaa. The current issue of banknotes ranges from 5 to 500 rufiyaa. Right now the official exchange rate is 12.8 rufiyaa to 1 US dollar.
Another place that the rupee is used is in the classic game, The Legend of Zelda. In the game the rupees are gems. Different colors have different values. These range from the green which is worth 1, to the orange which is worth 500.