500 Rupees - Specimen Travellers Cheque State Bank of India Calcutta

State Bank of India travellers cheques are rarely catalogued with any seriousness, which is a mistake. The Nasik Road Security Press — formally the India Security Press — handled the bulk of India's sensitive financial documents through this period, and the 500-rupee denomination here would have represented a substantial sum in 1979: roughly equivalent to a month's salary for many urban workers at the time.

Specimen cheques from this series were produced for internal approval and training purposes. Surviving examples almost always carry "SPECIMEN" perforation or overprint, and the cotton substrate was chosen specifically to match the tactile standards applied to currency rather than commercial cheque stock.