500 Rupees Specimen Travellers Cheque External Issue State Bank of India Bombay

The State Bank of India's travellers cheque programme expanded aggressively in the 1970s and 1980s to serve the Indian diaspora and foreign-exchange tourists at a time when private sector alternatives were tightly restricted under FEMA and its predecessor regulations. The "External Issue" designation marks this as intended for use outside India — a bureaucratic distinction that mattered enormously under the capital controls of the period, since domestically-issued and externally-issued instruments carried different redemption rules and foreign exchange accounting treatment.

Specimen examples like this were produced by the India Security Press at Nashik for internal distribution and training purposes, never released into circulation. The ISP's involvement is notable — it primarily handled passport and postage production, and its travellers cheque output represents a relatively narrow slice of the facility's overall work.