Children's Day is celebrated every year on November 14 to celebrate the birth annivarsary of Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru who was one of the few great arshitects in the delicate and uncommon art of national building. He had a grand design for India and looked not just to today but was much more concerned with the tomorrow. He believed that children are the most valuable assets and to ensure a country's future its children have to be secured. Children are civilization's bas for the future and should, therefore, be nursed and nourished, trained and guided, helped and equipped to play their role as future builders of world destiny.

Recent researches shows that an estimate 45 percent of India's urban children and 55 percent in the rural areas out of a total child population of 260 million live below subsistence level. About 16.3 million Indian Children or rouhly 5 percent of the total number are sentenced to labour, they work on farms and in factories and will grow up unable to read or write. Less than 5% of India's children attend school. Over a hundred per 100,000 Indian Children are totally physically handicapped.

Upto 40,000 a year go blind due to Vitamin A defficiency. Over a million in the age group of 1-4 years die every year due to sickness, 60 percent of them within a month of being born. But the most lethal killer of all remains starvation: it takes a toll of about 100,000 children every month according to UNICEF reports. At such a state of affairs, conscientious eforts of the policy makers, voluntary organisations, social workers and experts need to be channelised so that programmes geared to guarantee the children their basic rights to love, affection and understandings are organised providing opportunities to children to develop into useful members of the society.

It is the moral duty of all of us to assure the children their right to a harmonious co-existence and every gesture that awakens mankind to the continuing and often desperate needs of children must be given its fullest support. As stamps communicate to masses in an effective way, the Indian Posts & Telegraphs Departments every year propagates and promotes an important message of mass awakening about the needs of the children and is happy to issue a special postage stamp on Children's Day, 1984.

Source : Information Folder issued by Indian Posts & Telegraph Department, Government of India