Jadav Payeng - The Forest Man of India

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Jadav Payeng - The Forest Man of India

Popularly known as the ‘Forest Man of India’ Jadav Payeng has spent more than 30 years of his life planting 40 million trees to build a real man-made forest of 1360 acres. A feat very few people has achieved so far. So, who is Jadav Payeng and what’s his story? Let’s find out.

Forest Man of India - Jadav Payeng (image source: indiatoday)

There’s also a children’s book called ‘Jadav and the Tree Place’ which tells his story of how he single-handedly made a forest which now houses a large number of wild creatures.

This incredible environmental activist has also signed an agreement with the NGO Fundacion Azteca of Mexico to collaborate on environmental projects with the goal of planting 7 million trees in the North American country. He has been granted a 10-year visa by the Mexican authorities.

Jadav ‘Molai’ Payeng was born on 1963 to a Mising tribe in Majuli, Assam. From a young age, Payeng was concerned about the environment. In 1979, when he was 16 years old, he witnessed that many snakes were starting to die due to rising temperature after floods washed them onto the treeless sandbar. He immediately decided to plant around 20 bamboo seedlings on the sandbar.

In the same year, he began working in the forest when the Golaghat district of Assam's social forestry division initiated a tree-planting initiative on 200 hectares at Aruna Chapori, around 5 kilometres from Kokilamukh in Jorhat. Unfortunately, the programme did not really get much work done and was discontinued in 1983.

But Payeng did not give up. He started planting and tending trees along sandbar on the Majuli island which is the world’ largest inhabited river island located in the Brahmaputra river.

And over the course of time, the forest started growing and it now encompasses an area of about 1,360 acres.

It has become home to Bengal tigers, elephant herds, Indian rhinoceros and over hundred deer, rabbits and a wide diversity of native and migratory species and thousands of trees which includes Valcol, arjun (Terminalia arjuna), ejar (Lagerstroemia speciosa), goldmohur (Delonix regia), koroi (Albizia procera), moj (Archidendron bigeminum), himolu and many others. Bamboo covers more than 300 hectares of land.

On World Earth Day in 2010, the Government of India awarded Jadav Payeng, the title of "The Forest Man" in Delhi for turning a barren tract of 550 hectares into a beautiful green forest all by himself. In 2015, President Pranab Mukherjee bestowed the Padma Shri, India's fourth highest civilian award, on him.

Jadav Payeng has become an inspiration to many and shows how we can all do our part to save the planet without waiting for others to do so. Like he says “I’ll plant till my last breath.”

It was only in 2008, when forest department officers went to the region in search of 115 elephants who had retreated into the forest after damaging property in the village of Aruna Chapori, that Jadav’s efforts came to be known to the rest of the world. The officials were taken aback by the size and density of the forest, and since then the department has returned to the location on a regular basis. The forest soon came to be known as Molai forest or Molai Kathoni, named after him.

His efforts were deeply appreciated and soon he started receiving international recognition. In recent years, Payeng has been the focus of a number of award-wining documentaries. His character inspired a fictional film starring Rana Daggubati that was released in Tamil, Telugu, and Hindi under the titles “Kaadan”, “Aranya,” and “Hathi mera sathi”. The Molai Forest, a locally produced documentary film by Jitu Kalita, was shown at Jawaharlal Nehru University in 2012.