Have you got your hands on the new Rs 2,000 note yet? After PM Modi’s announcement to scrap Rs 500 and Rs 1,000 notes, that’s the question most Indians are asking each other. But buzz on Twitter was that the new note had an error on it.
The so called ‘error’ is on the back side of the note, as reported by news website Satyagraha. The back side of the note has the value of the currency written in 15 languages.
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Now, if you notice carefully there are two places where “don hazaar rupaiye” is written in Devanagari script. People assumed the error was a spelling mistake in Hindi.
“Don hazaar rupaiye” is Marathi for two thousand rupees.
But why does it appear twice, you ask?
In any note, Marathi is preceded by the value written in Konkani. Which in the case of the new Rs 2,000 note is written as “don hazaar rupaiye” as well.
The confusion may have stemmed from the fact that the Devanagari script has been used. But Hindi alone doesn’t use the script. Other major Indian languages – Marathi, Nepali, Konkani and Sanskrit are also written in Devanagari.
So the Devanagari script is used five times on the note, to write in five different languages.
While the news of the error created panic among Twitterati, who began to wonder if the Reserve Bank of India would have to withdraw the notes again, we can all relax, because the “error” is just an expression of the value in another language.
(Additional details have been added to this story regarding the Konkani and Marathi language.)
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