Currency Printing and Various Security Design Features

Pages:248-250
Arohit Goyat and Nishan Singh (Department of Printing Technology, GJUS&T, Hisar, Haryana)

In the modern era of Printing Technology, currency printing is the abstract of all printing applications. Most of the banknotes employ four types of printing processes namely Lithography, Intaglio, Letterpress, and Silk Screen Printing. Ink Features : All the inks used in bank note printing offer a certain amount of security because they are not commercially available and hence not available to would be counterfeiters. The inks used have to have a very high performance and be very resistant to environmental conditions such as sunlight, heat, moisture, etc. Ink features are of utmost importance like Colour Choice, Fluorescent Inks, Metallic Inks, Metameric Inks, Magnetic Inks, Optically Variable Inks, and Colour Changing Inks etc. etc. Substrate Features : The choice of substrate is very important as it has to be a very durable material resistant to tearing, withstanding crumpling and stable to environmental effects such as humidity. In a bid to overcome the menace of fake Indian currency notes, the Government has started giving serious thought to printing currency notes on polymer, a practice prevalent in Australia. “Australian notes are more secure against counterfeiting”. Some of the substrate features are Paper Features, Watermark, and Threads. Design Features : Many of the design features are built around precision printing that can be achieved by the highly specialised presses used in the production of bank notes. There are many types of design elements that can be worked into a bank note to give protection such as Rainbow Printing, Anti Copy Features, See through Features, Intaglio Detail, Latent Images, and Blind Recognition Features etc. Security features of currency printing were always remained a confidential and sensitive issue. Currency notes were always counterfeited in the world irrespective of several security and legal features. Therefore, now-a-days it is very relevant study to study the security features and designing features for identification and acceptance of only genuine currency and this study will help in this direction. As it is a non-ending process in the present world, therefore such studies will always be relevant and helpful in future.