India's First Postage Stamp & Asia's First Stamp - The Scinde Dawk - 1852. (English Version)

Scinde Dawk was a postal system of runners that served the Indus Valley of Sindh, present-day Pakistan. The term also refers to the first adhesive postage stamps in Asia, the forerunners of the adhesive stamps used throughout India, Burma, the Straits Settlements, and other areas controlled by the British East India Company. The name derives from the words "Scinde", the British spelling of the name of the province of Sindh, and "Dawk", the anglicized spelling of the Hindustani word "Dak" or Post.

The Dawk, or Dak, was an ancient postal system of runners. The runners were paid according to their distance of travel and the weight of their letters. This was a local Indus Valley system, inefficient and inadequate for the military and commercial needs of the British East India Company after their conquest of Sindh in February 1843, following the Battle of Miani.

Sir Bartle Frere of the East India Company became the Chief Commissioner of Sindh in 1850. Following the English example set by Rowland Hill, Frere improved upon the postal system of Sindh by introducing a cheap and uniform rate for postage, independent of distance traveled. In 1851 the runners were replaced with an efficient system using horses and camels, following routes through Scinde province, generally along the valley of the Indus River. The mail was carried quickly and efficiently, connecting government offices and post offices from Karachi through Kotri and Hyderabad up to Sukkur in the north.

Stamps were required for the prepayment of postage, a basic feature of the new system. These stamps, first issued on 1 July 1852, bore the Merchants' Mark of the British East India Company in a design embossed on wafers of red sealing wax impressed on paper. Because they cracked and disintegrated, they were soon replaced by a colorless design embossed on white paper which was hard to see in dim light. The last stamps were blue embossed on white paper. All of these had a value of only one-half anna each, but today they rank among the rare classics of philately.

Forgeries of these rare stamps are plentiful. The most easily detected fakes are not embossed on paper. Other crude imitations show a misalignment of the second letter 'A' of ANNA with the 'K' of DAWK, and in other fakes, the '1/2' is not separated from the central heart-shaped emblem. (Source: Wikipedia).

The stamps shown in the video is a private collection requested and recorded in the presence of the owner for informative purpose.

No of existence: Less than 100 and extremely rare.

Face Value of stamp: one-half anna.

in 2019, Siegel Auctions' price realized for red scinde dawk is £24000

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