mUMBAI, May 24 -- With the rupee at the cusp of hitting 100 against a dollar, everybody is interested in, and has, a view on the exchange rate right now. Views and predictions aside, how does the situation look like, historically speaking? HT has looked at the numbers to distil the good (there is), the bad and the ugly of the current churn in the foreign exchange markets right now. Let us look at them one by one. The rupee-dollar exchange rate is as much a sentiment shaper as it is a tangible factor for the economy. To be sure, the sentiment matters because foreign exchange markets have a tendency to enter self-fulfilling spirals. The ongoing fall in the rupee's value is concerning for precisely this reason, but it is not the worst India has had so far. HT did a historical analysis of episodes of rupee depreciation by first calculating the rupee's fall over different periods-namely one year, six months, three months, two months and one month-using daily rupee spot rate data since December 1979. For each period, we ranked dates by the size of depreciation. After selecting a date with a large fall, we removed nearby dates within the same time window to prevent counting the same depreciation episode repeatedly. The latest date, of Friday, was kept separately so that the current fall in the rupee remained visible in the historical comparison even if it was part of an ongoing episode. The comparison shows that the current slide is not yet in the league of India's worst currency shocks, but it is no ordinary bout of weakness either. On a one-year basis, the rupee's 11.2% fall is the 15th sharpest depreciation episode in the data. The episodes above it are mostly associated with far more turbulent moments-for instance, March 1992, when the one-year fall was 63%, March 2009 during the global financial crisis, when it was 29.82%, June 2012 at 27.24%, and August 2013 during the taper tantrum at 23.61%. The shorter-period rankings are less alarming. The latest fall ranks 24th over six months, 31st over three months, 99th over two months and 132nd over one month. Put differently, the rupee has been falling slowly enough to avoid panic - RBI seems to have played its part here - but long enough to show up as one of its sharper annual declines. Over the past 12 months, the rupee has depreciated 11.2% against the dollar, more than the Philippine peso, Indonesian rupiah, South Korean won, Taiwan dollar, Chinese yuan, Vietnamese dong and Thai baht in this comparison. It is also the worst performer on a year-to-date basis, with a 6.9% fall. Since February 27, the start of the West Asia war shock, the rupee has declined by nearly 5%. Other Asian currencies have found cushions that India has lacked. The won and Taiwan dollar have drawn support from the AI and semiconductor trade, although both economies have seen some foreign investor outflows in recent weeks amid concerns of high valuation, while the yuan and Vietnamese dong have benefited from tighter currency management. The rupee is also managed, but interventions by the RBI has only slowed the fall rather than reversed the pressure from higher oil prices, equity outflows and rising US yields. The rupee's fall cannot be explained away as a simple case of dollar strength. Since the end of 2024, the broad dollar index, which is a trade-weighted measure of the dollar against currencies of major US trading partners, has fallen from 129.3 to 119.3, a decline of 7.7%. In short, the rupee has weakened at a time when the dollar itself has not been broadly strengthening. The pressure, therefore, has to be found closer home. Looking at FII flows as a share of forex reserves makes the pressure clearer, because it shows how large the flows are relative to India's available dollar cushion. In March 2026, net FII outflows were equal to 1.98% of forex reserves, and the average rupee weakened 2.34% from the previous month. April saw another outflow worth 1.08% of reserves, and the rupee weakened further. Until May 21, the outflow has been smaller, but the rupee still fell 2.23%, showing that oil and broader balance-of-payments pressures had begun doing their own damage. A comparison with the good times is useful. In March-June 2017, FII inflows ranged between 0.94% and 2.32% of reserves, and the rupee strengthened sharply. In 2024 too, inflows between June and September helped keep the rupee broadly stable around 83-84 per dollar. On the other hand, during the 2013 taper tantrum, FII outflows worth 2.5% of reserves in June 2013 coincided with a 6.17% monthly fall in the rupee. The current episode has not been as violent in a single month, but it has lasted longer. The problem is RBI cannot keep managing the rupee if investor sentiment does not see a sustained revival....