RBI dismisses claims that Gandhiji to be replaced in currency notes
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Mumbai: Reserve Bank of India (RBI) on Monday dismissed reports about a proposal to replace Mahatma Gandhi's face on Indian currency notes with Rabindranath Tagore, APJ Abdul Kalam or others, PTI reported.
The central bank released a statement saying that there were reports by certain sections of media that the RBI was planning to change Gandhiji's face. It may be noted that there is no such proposal in the Reserve Bank," it said.
Reports earlier claimed that the finance ministry and the RBI were contemplating using the faces of other prominent Indians, including Rabindranath Tagore and APJ Abdul Kalam, on banknotes of certain denominations.
Also, RBI and the Security Printing and Minting Corporation of India (SPMCIL) under the Ministry of Finance has sent two different sets of samples of Gandhi, Tagore and Kalam watermarks to Professor Dilip T Shahani, IIT-Delhi Emeritus professor, to select from the two and present it to the government for final consideration.
According to the government sources, the ultimate decision on the selection of one or all three images would be taken at the "highest level". Additionally, the sources have informed that there was official approval for designing the watermark samples. Although no firm decision has been made yet, the move to explore the possibility of incorporating multiple watermarks into currency notes is in progress.
Globally, there has been precedence: in the US, dollars of different denominations carry images of the Founding Fathers such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Alexander Hamilton and a few presidents from the 19th century, including Abraham Lincoln.
In 2017, one of the nine RBI internal committees set up to recommend new security features for new notes submitted its report by 2020, according to top government sources. The committee report put forward the proposal to include watermark images of other figures like Tagore and Kalam in all currency notes except the Rs. 2000 note which has stopped printing.
The New Indian Express reported that in 2021, the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) instructed the Mysore-based Bharatiya Reserve Bank Note Mudran Pvt Ltd and the SPMCIL's Security Paper Mill at Hoshangabad to design their own set of watermark samples. Subsequently, RBI and SPMCIL sent samples to Shahani for testing. Shahani has had several rounds of discussions with officials about the "subtle aspects" of the samples.