Art of printing money

With all this current talk about the probability of Greece exiting the Eurozone, abandoning the single currency Euro and once again using its drachma, forced one to think about the this entire process of how money is actually printed. Drachma is no longer in existence and that means, if and that’s a “big” if, Greece exits and starts printing the drachma, how will Greece be printing its money?  And that brought us to the question – how does the RBI print money?

What we learnt we share – obviously, it would be printed by the RBI and it is sole decision maker about how much to print. So as per the process, first a master die is made and this die is created by several artists. No single designer is used; every part of the currency is made by a different person.

After that, the master die creates plates; the work of the master die is pretty much over by then and it is then stored in a safety vault, somewhere deep and secretive. The plates are put onto a press would apply huge tons of pressure on the plate.

The paper used for the currency is also created by an authorized maker – it is either made by the mint itself or outsourced. This “paper” is usually a durable cloth/paper blend with watermarks and denomination strips created into the paper. This special paper is run through the press through a pressure process and the bills are printed.

The currency is supervised at every stage for print and overall quality. They are then cut and wrapped, after which it is once again accounted and inspected for quality and veracity.  It is after this that the bills are distributed to banks. 

The beauty of it all – no one person knows every part of the process or is part of the whole process from start to finish.