10 Rupees Women's Year FAO

Issued in 1975 as part of the FAO's ongoing push to tie commemorative coinage to food security themes, this piece also coincided with International Women's Year — a UN designation that India, then under Indira Gandhi's government, was politically well-positioned to promote. The dual mandate of women's empowerment and agricultural development wasn't incidental: rural Indian women constituted the backbone of subsistence farming, and the FAO explicitly lobbied member states to acknowledge that connection through their commemorative programs.

KM#190 is frequently found with uneven surfaces from the large copper-nickel planchet, a known characteristic of Indian mint production at this diameter during the mid-1970s.