Indian Five Rupee coins - IX

5 rupee international crop science congress

The 5 rupee coin of the international crop science congress. This international conference was to be held in 1996 and a large quantity of these commemorative coins were to be minted, but for some reason the conference got canceled and never happened. So the mintage of these coins was halted in between. As a result, only 11,000 such coins were minted. This is definitely one of the rare coins of republic India. Though after wards, the Calcutta mint released a two coin set having two such coins. So these are now not as rare as they originally were,but it is still rare enough to catch the fancy of numismatists. The design on the obverse is the globe with crops all over it.

And BTW, it does not look like it in the picture, but this coin I have put up has some shine and some very beautiful toning to it when we see it in light, and counts as UNC(UNC from original circulated issues of crop science and not taken from the set that was later released and is a restrike). The given condition is rare to find and has a premium pricing to it as well.

5 rupee, 60 years of commonwealth

The 5 rupee of the 60 years of commonwealth shows the Indian parliament with the Indian flag on it. The design is almost identical to the one rupee commemorative coin issued in 1991 on the commonwealth parliamentary conference.

5 rupee: Perarignar anna durai

Conjeevaram Natarajan Annadurai (15 September 1909 – 3 February 1969), popularly called Anna (which means elder brother in Tamil), was a former Chief Minister of the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu.He was the first member of a Dravidian party to hold that post and was also the first non-Congress leader to form a majority government in independent India.

He was also known by another title: Perarignar, which means great genius. He was an erudite scholar, an astute politician, a wise statesman , an acclaimed writer and a powerful orator. He had scripted and acted in several plays. Some of his plays were later made as movies. He was the first politician from the Dravidian parties to extensively use Tamil cinema for political propaganda. Born in a middle class family of weavers, he started his career as a school teacher and then moved into the political scene of the Madras Presidency as a journalist. He edited several political journals and enrolled as a member of the Dravidar Kazhagam. As an ardent follower of Periyar E. V. Ramasamy he rose in stature as a prominent member of the party.

Various protests against the then ruling Congress government took him to prison on several occasions. The last was during the Madras anti-Hindi agitation of 1965. The agitation itself helped Annadurai to gain popular support for his party. His party won a landslide victory in the 1967 state elections. His cabinet was the youngest at that time in India. He legalised Self-respect marriages, enforced a two language policy (over the three language formula in other southern states) for the state, implemented subsidising cost of rice and renamed the Madras State to Tamil Nadu.

However, he died of cancer just two years into office and his funeral was the most attended one at that time, holding a Guinness record. Several institutions and organisations are named after him. A splinter party launched by M. G. Ramachandran in 1972 years after the death of Annadurai was named after him as ADMK (Anna Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam).