Seven-year-old Ankita of Safrai Rangapara-gaon is proud of her new collection of 13 books,each with interesting stories. I have already read all of them at least once, says the Class II student of Safrai Adarsha Vidyalala in Sivasagar district in upper Assam. Ankita is among the hundreds of children belonging to the tea tribes of Assam who have been distributed this bunch of 13 books,developed by UNICEF in collaboration with Aneshwa,a Guwahati-based NGO. These books are being distributed among children of this community,whose members are tea workers spread across several districts of Assam. The community is one of the most impoverished and fares poorly on most human development indices. The tea tribe community is a group of people of various originsmigrant labourers from Bengal,Bihar,Jharkhand,Chhattisgarh,Madhya Pradesh,Andhra Pradesh,Kerala and Tamil Naduwho were brought by the British in the mid-19th century to work in Assams tea plantations. Our people today have no links with their places of origin, says Ganesh Kurmi,a retired Commissioner of Tea Tribe Welfare,Assam,whose grandfather was among a group of labourers who came from Hazaribagh,now in Jharkhand,between 1860 and 1870. It was in 1841 that the British planters brought the first batch of people from Hazaribagh to work in the tea estates. But they were herded here like animals and none of them survived,prompting the enactment of the Workmens Breach of Contract Act in 1859 and the Employees and Workers Dispute Act in 1860. Workers were brought from various places like Chotanagpur,Bengal,the old presidencies of Bombay and Madras,and also from places currently in Andhra Pradesh,Kerala,Chhattisgarh,Jharkhand,Madhya Pradesh,Bihar and UP, says Kurmi. Over the years,the tea tribes languished,struggling to educate their children or improve their standard of living. So when UNICEF came up with the idea of developing materials that would attract children of the tea tribe community towards school and education,we immediately jumped into it, says Paresh Malakar,president of Aneshwa. Three workshops were held with writers from the community and various scholars and at the end of it,13 childrens books were brought out. Not all the 13 books are storybooks. One is about a tea-tribe boy visiting an oil exploration site,which will inspire the children to think of the world outside the plantations as they grow up,get educated and think of a better career, says Sushil Suri,who teaches history in Sonari College in upper Assam,and who is from the tea tribe community. While most of the stories were picked up from the oral tradition that members of the community had managed to preserve,the authors retold them in simple words. We have kept the original themes intact,but changed and simplified the words so that children across the state can understand and enjoy them, says Rita Goala,also of the same community,who is headmistress at the Duliabam Tea Estate Primary School near Dibrugarh. The community has very poor literacy levelsnot more than 20 per cent. How can you expect them to send their children to school, asks Sushil Suri,who recently did his M.Phil on the socio-economic changes among tea labourers in Assam. But interestingly,while these books are meant for the tea-tribe children,giving them to other children will help bring other communities closer to the tea tribes, says Malakar of Aneshwa.
