New Coins

Among Jawaharlal Nehru's many ambitions for India is to make its measures metric, its thermometers Centigrade and its coinage decimal. Easier said than done. Through the length and breadth of India, there are more than 140 different systems of weights and measures. Dates and records are kept according to 30 different calendars, at least one of which, instituted more than 500 years ago with a slight miscalculation, has slipped out of phase by 23.2 days, so that Hindu dances meant for moonlit nights are often performed in total darkness. To top it all, the Indian coinage system, based on the coinage standardized by conquering British in 1835, is at least as unwieldy as that used in Britain itself.

Last week, having already established a national calendar of twelve months (more or less comparable to the Gregorian) and threatening soon to put weights and measures on the metric system, Nehru's government chose to inaugurate a new decimal coinage. In place of the rupee (20-c-), anna (1/16 rupee) and pie (1/12 anna) of the past, the new money will consist solely of rupees and naye paise (literally: new coins) worth .01 rupees. The trouble is that for three years both sets of coins will be used at once, and since there is not always a way of translating pies or annas into a precise number of naye paise, the government has had to decree a system of what parimutuel bettors call "breakage." i.e., the rounding off of small fractions that don't count too much.

Last week, as the first of 610.000,000 new coins poured into the bazaars, India's newspapers carried conversion tables with instructions on how to use them. Sample: "To make a payment of 36 naye paise, you first pay 4 annas or 25 naye paise, then pay the balance of 11 naye paise by tendering 1 anna and 9 pies."

In Calcutta, where thrifty Bengalis ran wild in 1953 over a 1/3cent rise in streetcar fares, mobs rioted around the post offices when it was discovered that the price of stamps would be rounded off in favor of the government. In industrial Kanpur, bus service was tied up for hours when bus drivers discovered they could not drive and argue about fares at the same time. Mothers fretted that the new coins were too easy for kids to swallow. Even the beggars complained formally that the changeover would cost them profits since passers-by now tossed them a mere naya paisa (.01 rupee) instead of a pice (.015 rupee). But through it all, Decimalist Nehru seemed pleased and proud of his changeover, as well he might. He had decided to get it over while India was still largely unencumbered by adding machines and cash registers. "The later we made it," he said, "the more difficult it would have been."

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