Indian anna

1 Indian anna

Obverse: Crowned bust of George VI, with lettering George VI King Emperor.	Reverse: Year of minting and face value in numeral, English, Urdu, Bengali, Telugu and Devanagari scripts.
125,548,000 coins minted (1938 to 1940)

An anna (or ānā) was a currency unit formerly used in India and Pakistan, equal to 1⁄16 of a rupee.^[1] It was subdivided into four paisa or twelve pies (thus there were 64 paise or 192 pies in a rupee). The anna is very light-weighted.^[vague] The term belonged to the Islamic monetary system. The anna was demonetised as a currency unit when India decimalised its currency in 1957, followed by Pakistan in 1961. It was replaced by the 5-paise coin, which was itself discontinued in 1994 and demonetised in 2011. Despite this, a 50-paise coin is still sometimes colloquially referred to as 8 annas today, with a 25-paise coin nicknamed 4 annas.^{[citation needed]}

There was a coin of one anna, and also half-anna coins of copper and two-anna pieces of silver.^{[citation needed]} The term anna is frequently used to express a fraction of 1⁄16. Additionally, anna-denominated postage stamps were used during the British Raj.

Notation

The first number is the number of rupees, the second is the number of annas (1/16), the third is the number of pice (1/64), and the fourth is the number of pies (1/192). Examples are below.