Info
Fiscal = stamp which uses one for pre-payment of various administrative fees and taxes. These fiscals can one divide according to the type of pre-paid fee or tax:
court fees – mainly with inscription „Court Fee“ in English or in native scripts, for the Court Fee cases such as licenses, action in court,... It is specific use of revenues.
receipt – with inscription „Receipt“, for the acknowledgement of receipt of payment
for bills of exchange – called according to Hindi word also „Hundis“
Except them, many other types of fiscals exist for various specific fees and taxes e.g. alcohol tax, motor vehicle tax and entertainment tax. Individual emissions were very often valid for other possible uses e.g. combination of Revenue and Receipt. The fiscal was attached to document either some pre-printed form or simple sheet of paper after the payment and has to be cancelled properly. This was done by several ways:
writing – common, many times with adding some data – serial number, date
punching – common, such items can't be considered as damaged
canceling – scarce, by using normal cancellations as by stamps
Mostly was used the combination of writing with punching. Bad or none devaluation was highly penalized. It was also probably disabled to overlap the fiscals with the exception of very big fiscals.
The fiscals were printed either in India or in England. In England it was printed in the world-famous De La Rue press. In India, there were many local prints generally of small capacity. Almost one half of the Indian state fiscals were printed in the L.V. Indap & Co. in Bombay print. Therefore, many types carry some common design portions (see the example below).
Baghal - Type 5 - KM 55 Kumharsain - Type 6 - KM 64
Totally, in India was except British India approximately 650 states from which about 480 issued fiscals.
These fiscals were compiled in three-part catalogue by Koeppel and Manners (KM).