2 Annas WWII Cash Coupon

Palitana was a small princely state in the Kathiawar region of what is now Gujarat. These cash coupons were issued during the Second World War when the metal shortages that plagued the entire subcontinent made small-denomination coin production impractical even for major mints — for a minor state like Palitana, ordinary fractional coinage had effectively ceased to be a viable option well before the war made things worse.

The S-prefix in the Pick reference denotes a local or provisional issue, and these Kathiawar emergency coupons are among the smallest-format paper instruments in the entire Indian princely states series by physical size.