Over the last few years quantities of coin blanks likely to be in the thousands of millions have been imported for use in the production of most if not all of 1, 2 and 5 Rupee denominations. The other way to quantify this is to say that thousands of tonnes of coin-blanks per year are involved. Companies known to tender for these contracts include the British Royal Mint, the Birmingham Mint, the Royal Canadian Mint and Krupp VDM of Germany. A few problems were hit a couple of years ago with the supply of coin-blanks. These supply problems involved one of the parties concerned not wanting to go along with the expensive exercise of having to produce the mandatory batch of five-hundred sample coin-blanks. One imagines that the samples were eventually made since this is all a very competetive business.

For one reason or another - but perhaps related to the above - there are variations to be seen in the "colours" of some of the Cu-Ni issues of around the last 10 years. A simple example being that the Noida 2 Rupees are rather often a lot "brighter" looking than most pieces of other mints. (Though I believe they make their own blanks.)

(I hope to do a suitable image to show this - sometime.)