Tamil Nadu on Thursday replaced the rupee symbol ( ₹) with a Tamil letter (translated as Ru) for the logo of the state budget 2025-26, a symbolic move that triggered a political storm and ratcheted up the already simmering tensions between the state and the Centre over language.
State finance minister Thangam Thennarasu is scheduled to table the budget on Friday. The state government had used the rupee symbol in last year’s budget.
The Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam (DMK) government released a 24-second video to announce the budget, which had a logo where the rupee symbol was replaced by the Tamil alphabet with a tagline “Ellorkkum Ellaam” (everything for everyone). “This budget is for all sections of the society,” chief minister MK Stalin said on X, sharing the video -- the amplification suggesting that the state was taking its fight with the Centre to the next level.
Ru is the first letter of the Tamil word Rubaai, which denotes the Indian currency in the southern language.
The Indian rupee symbol was officially adopted in 2010 and was designed by D Udaya Kumar, a professor at IIT Guwahati, who combined the Devanagari letter and the Latin capital “R” with a horizontal stroke. It is now widely used in financial and digital transactions.
The Tamil Nadu State Planning Commission executive vice-chairman J Jeyaranjan said the only reason the state government replaced the rupee symbol was that it did not want to use the Devanagari script. “We don’t want to use Devanagari. That’s all,” he told news agency ANI.
The incident sparked a political controversy. The Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) hit out at the state government.
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“If the DMK has a problem with ‘ ₹’, why didn’t it protest back in 2010 when it was officially adopted under the Congress-led government, at a time when the DMK was part of the ruling alliance at the Centre?...This is more than mere symbolism—it signals a dangerous mindset that weakens Indian unity and promotes secessionist sentiments under the pretence of regional pride,” Union finance minister Nirmala Sitharaman said in a post on X.
The DMK hit back, with party spokesperson Saravanan Annadurai saying no law “opposed or stopped using Ru in Tamil”. “Then why such anger,” he asked on X.
DMK MLA Ezhilan Naganathan accused the BJP of trying to provoke them. “BJP is trying to find all types of issues to provoke us. Using the mother tongue for all purposes is the theme of the principles that they have set,” he said.
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A DMK leader said that the chief minister’s action was to only show that Tamil was one of the 15 official languages in the country. “This is our way of expressing our connection to our mother tongue. It is not against the Constitution,” the leader said, asking not to be named.
BJP TN chief K Annamalai attacked the chief minister. “The DMK Government’s State Budget for 2025-26 replaces the rupee symbol designed by a Tamilian, which was adopted by the whole of Bharat and incorporated into our currency. Thiru Udhay Kumar, who designed the symbol, is the son of a former DMK MLA. How stupid can you become, Thiru @mkstalin?” he said on X.
Leader of opposition and AIADMK general secretary Edappadi Palaniswami (EPS) called the move as DMK “diversionary tactic”. “This empty advertisement campaign would not help to address the people’s aspirations and needs. This is just a divisionary tactic,” he said.
The controversy came amid a spiralling row between the DMK and the BJP over the twin issues of language and delimitation. Tamil Nadu has strongly opposed the National Education Policy, and said that the three-language policy is a tactic to impose Hindi in a state with a strong regional identity.
Stalin and Union education minister Dharmendra Pradhan have sparred repeatedly over language and the implementation of NEP in the state, including this week. Stalin also said that the Union government was sowing the seeds of another language war and that Tamil Nadu was ready for it. Language has long been an emotive issue for the state that was rocked by anti-Hindi agitation in the 1960s.
The issue also rocked Parliament this week.
During his reply in the Lok Sabha on the central funds for the PM Schools for Rising India (PM SHRI) scheme, Pradhan called the Stalin government “dishonest”, evoking protests from the DMK MPs, who raised slogans and disrupted proceedings. Pradhan said the Tamil Nadu government agreed to the PM SHRI scheme and DMK lawmakers conveyed this to him. “But when they went back, they made a U-Turn. They are doing mischief with the lives of the students. They are misleading the people and doing injustice to students of Tamil Nadu... They just want to do politics.”
Shortly afterwards, Stalin took to social media to launch a scathing attack against the Union minister, who he accused of speaking with “arrogance as if he was a king” and asked him to “control his tongue”.
As the latest controversy raged, IIT Guwahati professor D Udaya Kumar, who designed the rupee symbol, refused to be drawn into the controversy and said it was mere coincidence that his father was a DMK lawmaker. “I don’t have any reaction. It’s the government which suddenly felt that there was a need for a change and they wanted to implement their own script. This is up to the state government. So, I don’t have anything to say about that. It’s entirely up to the government,” Kumar told news agency PTI.
Kumar’s father N Dharmalingam was an MLA from the Rishivandiyam constituency in 1971 from the DMK. “My father was an MLA even before I was born. Now, he is old and living in our village, leading his life peacefully. It just happened to be a coincidence, probably I could have been somebody else as well,” the professor said.
