Indian Rupee Crashes To 90 Per Dollar For The First Time Ever
For the first time in history, the Indian rupee slipped past the 90-per-dollar level, touching 90.02 in early trade on Wednesday.
The fall came as banks continued buying US dollars at higher rates, foreign investors pulled money out of Indian markets, and companies rushed to hedge against further weakness in the currency.
The rupee has been one of Asia’s weakest currencies this year, losing nearly 5 percent of its value so far.
The latest slide has been made worse by steep US tariffs on Indian goods and the long delay in finalising a trade deal between India and the United States.
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Market experts say that unless the tariff dispute is resolved soon, pressure on the rupee is likely to continue. Sat Duhra of Janus Henderson Investors told Reuters that the recent tariff tensions have “really accelerated the decline”, with India now facing the highest US tariffs globally.
The fresh drop has also revived a long-running social media myth about whether the rupee was once equal to the US dollar.
In reality, this was never the case. At Independence, the rupee was linked to the British pound, and the implied exchange rate worked out to about ₹3.3 per dollar. Through the early decades, India followed a fixed exchange-rate system. The rupee stood around ₹4.76 in 1950 but fell sharply to ₹7.50 after the major devaluation of 1966.
Economic pressures in the 1990s pushed the exchange rate further, with the rupee moving from about ₹17.5 in 1990 to ₹22.7 in 1991 during the balance-of-payments crisis.
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After liberalisation, the rupee gradually became more market-driven and weakened over the years—crossing 45 in 2000, touching 56 during the 2013 Federal Reserve “taper tantrum”, and falling past 70 in 2018.
By 2024, the rupee averaged around ₹84.8 per dollar. In recent days it hovered near ₹88–89 before finally dropping below the crucial 90 mark today.
