Times of India 14 Aug, 2011, 12.16AM IST, Vikram DoctorVikram Doctor,ET Bureau How dollar was almost issued by India once
Jason Goodwin spent his first dollar in Ahmedabad station. As he recounts in Greenback, his excellent history of the US dollar, this was when he was a 17-year-old British kid backpacking across India and he fell sick in Ahmedabad. Wanting only to get out of Ahmedabad and to Bombay, a common sentiment, he tried buying a train ticket, but the ticket clerk said there was nothing for two days. The clerk changed his mind after Goodwin gave him a green banknote. "I was impressed by the dollar's power to bend the rules, even miles from its home," Goodwin writes. Many of us may have had similar moments, mine was given to be allowed to climb up the tower of the Bab Zuleywa gate in old Cairo. There are many reasons why the dollar is distinct, it has enduring value. A specimen from 1863, issued in the middle of the American Civil War, would be better off in a collection, but it would be technically useable, which is hardly the case with other countries which have changed currencies for reasons like inflation, integration (the European Union), independence and decimalisation. That last reason was historically another reason why the US dollar stood out among major currencies for being decimal, right from the start. When parts of the British Empire like Canada, Australia and New Zealand abandoned British pounds sterling for a more rational decimal currency, they all ended up choosing to call their currency the dollar. It could have happened in India as well. Decimalisation was always planned after Independence and before it finally came, in 1957, the government did consider, not an Indian dollar, but a rupee divided into 100 cents. Even before this, there actually were fairly advanced plans for an Indian dollar, though this was not in the context of decimalisation, but the coin shortage during WWII. "The Government proposed to issue an Indian 'Dollar', worth two rupees eight annas, as a measure to economise on the production of metallic one rupee and eight annas coins," explains Shailendra Bhandare, assistant keeper (South Asian Numismatics) at the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. Indian Dollar Bhandare, who is one of the foremost experts on Indian coins, says the dollar plans were at quite an advanced stage when, inexplicably, they were dropped. The few Indian dollars actually struck, with an Urdu inscription reading 'Dhai Rupiya', were never formally issued, but are still among the rarest specimens for collectors of Indian coins. Malcolm Todywalla, of Todywalla Auction House, specialist coin auctioneers, says that the last time any came up for sale was around 10 years back. -- Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community <[email protected]> Google Group: http://groups.google.com/group/RadicalCentrism Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
