Jadav Payeng, known as Molai Payeng, has earned the title of ‘The Forest Man of India’.
He has spent 30 years of his life planting around 40 million trees to create a real man-made forest. By changing a barren sandbar of the Brahmaputra, covering an area of 550 hectares of land which is known as ‘Molai Kathoni’, he made a forest Molai Kathoni, located near Kokilamukh in Assam’s Jorhat district, which is now the home to tigers, elephant herds, deer, rabbits and a wide diversity of native and migratory species and thousands of trees.
Jadav Payeng is now working on the initiative which is a massive plantation project involving eight lakh hectares of land in Mexico.
Payeng, at the age of 16, came to know that a large number of snakes died due to excessive heat after floods washed them onto the sandbar.
He planted around 20 bamboo seedlings on the sandbar of the Brahmaputra river and started working in the forest from 1979 when the Social Forestry division of Assam’s Golaghat district had launched a scheme of tree plantation on 200 hectares of land at Aruna Chapori in Jorhat district. He was one of the labourers of the project which was completed after five years.
Jadav Payeng has been honoured with Padma Shri in 2015.