01 July - Scinde Dawk first issued in 1852

Scinde Dawk first issued on 01 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.

Scinde Dawk was a very old postal system of runners that served the Indus Valley of Sindh, an area of present-day Pakistan. 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 anglicised spelling of the Hindustani word “Dak” or Post.

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 travelled. 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 colourless design embossed on white paper which was hard to see in a dim light. The last stamps were a blue embossing 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.