Saturday, February 11, 2006

The Evolution of the One Paisa (and extinction)

This is inspired by a recent post by Satish (see blogroll) and another by Ramki (blogroll). Satish gave a link to an interesting post, an epitaph to the one paisa copper coin, and Ramki spoke about being shortchanged in shops in a post about the service sector in India - a problem possibly aggravated by the non availability of small denomination coins.
I have used this opportunity to present the evolution of the one paisa coin.
Starting from the pre-decimal system days of pice and annas when they were ornate and cast in copper to its final form as a drab aluminium coin after rising costs cut it to size before sending it into oblivion.
Maybe the cost of minting of low denomination coins alone should not be used to decide whether to continue with them or not. Isn't there a value when they help to pay the exact cost of a product. Do we not devalue money when we don't bother to pick up the 5 paisa, 10 paisa, 25 paisa or sometimes the Re 1 change. Many countries still do have their versions of the paisa - the cent and penny for example.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Balaji,
Fascinating post. The best and most informative of all your recent posts. Nice sequence and gives the evolution of the lowly one paisa coin. Hoping to see many more such ones.

Anonymous said...

Thank You, Ramki. Will try to bring in some more material like this.