The Sunday Edition · No. 1 · Sunday, 4 October 2026
Issue No. 1
The night the rupee moved
On 5 June 1966 a dollar cost ₹4.76. By the next morning it cost ₹7.50. Welcome to The Sunday Edition.
The announcement came on the night of 5 June 1966 and took effect the next day. The rupee's par value went from ₹4.76 to the dollar to ₹7.50. Read one way, that is a devaluation of 36.5 per cent: each rupee bought a little under two thirds of the dollars it had bought the week before. Read the other way, the rupee price of a dollar rose by 57.5 per cent.
Both numbers are correct, and you will find both in the record. Newspapers at the time tended to print one and leave the reader to guess which. We print both, with the document each came from, because a figure without its receipt is only an opinion with decimals.
That is the whole idea of The Age Of Stars. Every figure in the paper arrives with its source and a grade: verified if we read it in the document itself, reported if it comes from a secondary account, estimated if it was derived. Where the record is silent we leave the space blank. A thin year means a thin record, not a quiet one.
What arrives on Sundays
Each week you will get one story told properly, a year from the archive with its figures, and the week’s puzzles. No tracking pixels, no advertising, and nothing we cannot footnote.
The 1966 edition is a good place to start. It holds the devaluation, the aid consortium that pressed for it, and the year’s inflation, running at nearly 11 per cent. Below it is the feature on all four of the rupee’s great breaks, from ₹3.31 in 1947 to ₹68.85 at the worst of August 2013.
If you have a document we should see, an annual report in a family trunk or a ledger nobody has scanned, send it to the desk. That is how the record gets longer.
Until next Sunday.
Also in the paper
The 1966 editionRupee devaluationEverything the record holds for 1966: the figures, the events and the documents behind them.The RupeeFour Devaluations and a TantrumA dollar cost ₹3.31 in 1947 and ₹68.85 at the worst of August 2013. The rupee's breaks, who made them, and what the record shows.The Puzzle PageThe Year in Question, a mini crossword and sudokuGuess the year from clues printed in the paper. New every day at midnight, India time.