Guwahati: Anwesha, a city-based NGO working for children's literature, will develop a set of 10 books for tea garden children in association with Unicef.

Anwesha president Paresh Malakar said this is their fifth collaboration with Unicef to develop books for children and they will involve educators and authors from the tea garden communities and also others.

Illustrators for children's books from Assam will also be part of the project.

The workshop will be organised from September 20 to 22 here and will be attended by experts in education and children's literature as resource persons, he said.

The Axom Sarba Sikhsa Abhiyan Mission, State Child Protection Society, Assam and Directorate of Welfare of Tea and Ex-Tea Garden Tribes are also involved in the endeavour.

In 2009, Anwesha had developed a set of 13 books for tea garden children.

During the other three collaborations they had developed books for Anganwadi centres, on water hygiene and sanitation and child rights.

"There are many obstacles in spreading education among tea garden children. The economic and cultural environment is not conducive for education. Children don't find reading an interesting and entertaining activity. Another thing is children are not reading because they find most of their books drab, uninteresting and detached from their life and everyday experience," Malakar said.

"One way of making these reluctant readers interested in reading could be providing them age-appropriate colourful reading materials with the content of their life and surroundings. Such efforts proved fruitful earlier. We are going to do it again," he said.

The Assam State Commission for Protection of Child Rights identified child labour as one of the major reasons of absenteeism and dropouts in primary schools.

Nearly 1 lakh of the total three lakh child labour (4 per cent of population) between five and 14 years of age work in tea gardens.

A survey by an international NGO, Save the Children, among 1,463 households in 70 tea gardens in seven tea-growing districts in Assam in 2016, had revealed that 63 per cent of children start working in gardens to earn for their families. A majority of the children started working in the gardens by 11 years.

"Where is the time to read if they start working from an early age?" asked Rajesh Tanti from the tea community from Titabar.

The Child Labour (Prohibition and Regulation) Amendment Act, 2016, prohibits employment of children aged below 14 years and those between 14 and 18 years in hazardous jobs.