India on Children’s Day 1984
A commemorative postage stamp on the National Children’s Day 1984 :
Issued by India
Issued on Nov 14, 1984
Issued for : As stamps communicate to masses in an effective way, the Indian Posts & Telegraphs Department every year propagates and promotes an important message of mass awakening about the needs of the children and is happy to issue a special postage stamp on Children’s Day, 1984.
Description of Designs : The stamp designed by India Security Press, Nasik’s based is on a painting by an Orthopedically handicapped child artist Master Hanif Kassam of Bombay. The First Day Cover shows a painting by Pravin Pramod Khairnar of Distt Nasik (Maharashtra). The cancellation has been designed by Nenu Bagga.
Type : Stamp, Postal Used
Colour : Multicolour
Denomination : 50 Paise
Overall size : 3.91 x 2.90 cms.
Printing size : 3.35 x 2.54 cms.
Perforation : 13 x 13
Paper : Unwatermarked P. G. matt coated paper
Number printed : 15,00,000
Number per issue sheet : 35
Printing process : Photogravure
Printed at : India Security Press
About :
- Children’s Day is celebrated every year on November 14 to celebrate the birth anniversary of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru who was one of the few great architects in the delicate and uncommon art of national building. He had a grand design for India and looked not just to today but was much more concerned with the tomorrow. He believed that children are the most valuable assets and to ensure a country’s future its children have to be secured.
- Children are civilization’s base for the future and should, therefore, be nursed and nourished, trained and guided, helped and equipped to play their role as future builders of world destiny. Recent researches show that an estimated 45 percent of India’s urban children and 55 percent in the rural areas out of a total child population of 260 million live below subsistence level. About 16.3 million Indian Children or roughly 5 percent of the total number are sentenced to labour, they work on farms and in factories and will grow up unable to read or write. Less than 5% of India’s Children attend school. Over a hundred per 100,000 Indian Children are totally physically handicapped. Upto 40,000 a year go blind due to vitamin A deficiency. Over a million in the age group 1-4 years die every year due to sickness, 60 percent of them within a month of being born. But the most lethal killer of all remains starvation; it takes a toll of about 100,000 children every month according to UNICEF reports.
- At such a state of affairs, conscientious efforts of the policy makers, voluntary organisations, social workers and experts need to be channelised so that programmes geared to guarantee the children their basic rights to love, affection and understanding are organised providing opportunities to children to develop into useful members of the society. It is the moral duty of all of us to assure the children their right to a harmonious co-existence and every gesture that awakens mankind to the continuing and often desperate needs of children must be given its fullest support.
- (Text courtesy Indian Council for Child Welfare, New Delhi).