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Philately Passport Karnataka
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About the Philately Passport

The Philately Passport is a pocket-sized booklet issued by the Karnataka Postal Circle, a division of India Post, first released in January 2025. It lists dozens of heritage sites, wildlife reserves, temples, forts, and natural landmarks spread across every district of Karnataka — each one linked to a specific, designated post office.

How it works

  1. Buy the passport at a philatelic bureau (Bengaluru GPO, Mysuru Head Post Office, Mangaluru Head Post Office, or Belagavi Head Post Office).
  2. Travel to one of the listed landmarks.
  3. Visit that landmark's designated post office.
  4. Affix a postage stamp on the dedicated page for that site.
  5. Ask the postmaster to cancel it with the site's Permanent Pictorial Cancellation (PPC) — a unique postmark bearing an image related to that landmark.

The idea traces back further than the passport itself: Karnataka's first-ever PPC was issued at Badami in 1987, and one has been added for roughly every district since. The Philately Passport packages that decades-long project into a single, structured travel itinerary — and it has proven unexpectedly popular, selling out within a day of launch at Bengaluru GPO, with the Karnataka Postal Circle reporting that around 90% of buyers are young travelers, content creators, and bikers rather than traditional stamp collectors.

What this site is

When we went looking for a single place that listed every passport site, its linked post office, how to get there, and why it matters, we couldn't find one — the official program has no public digital index. This site is an independent, community-built attempt to fill that gap: a searchable map and directory built from the passport's own district/landmark/post-office listing, supplemented with historical and travel research for each site.

It is not an official India Post or Karnataka Postal Circle product, and it doesn't sell passports or postage. Some entries are still marked "needs verification" while we confirm details like exact pincodes or coordinates — if you spot an error, or have visited a site and can confirm or correct something, please let us know.