I'm posting after a long break, but hope this will be a fresh start. During yesterday's Independence Day celebration, India Post issued a set of stamps (3rd in a series) on UNESCO world heritage sites. These stamps were intended to showcase selected cultural sites that have been inscribed on the list comprising over 1000 sites from around the world. Like previous 5-6 years of crowd-sourced stamp images, photographs were submitted by public through a competition on the MyGov platform. These competitions are typically being organized 1-2 months in advance of the actual stamp issuance, always delivering half baked designs. This particular stamp issue was no exception.
Total of five cultural sites were selected:
- Churches and convents of Goa - Church of Bom Jesus
- Historic city of Ahmadabad - Sarkhej Roza
- Group of monuments at Pattadakal
- Khajuraho group of monuments - Javari Temple
- Qutb Minar and its monuments, Delhi
Third error is some what technical, so it may need further verification. Nomination documents for Historic city of Ahmadabad that can be found on UNESCO World heritage web site says that Sarkhej Roza is outside the nominated world heritage site property. Why was this shown on the stamp then?
Lastly, the stamps are so poorly designed. Low quality fonts were used and placements of the words are not even on all the stamps either. The stone wall shown on Khajuraho temple stamp could have been easily cropped to highlight the actual temple more. There was also no need to put Qutb Minar on a stamp again - it has already been seen on several previous postal stamps issued by India Post.
An overall disaster, this stamp issue should be immediately recalled and new images, whether crowd sourced or not, should be selected, errors rectified and printed. Not cool, India Post.
