The Forest Man of India

Heartbroken by snakes that died on a bare, flood-scoured sandbar, one young man began planting trees by hand — and grew a forest larger than New York's Central Park.

In 1979, Jadav Payeng was a teenager on Majuli, a river island in the Brahmaputra in Assam, when floods washed a large number of snakes onto a treeless sandbar where they died in the heat with no shade to shelter them. The sight stayed with him, and he resolved to give the barren land a covering of green.

He started by planting bamboo seedlings, then broadened to many other species, tending them day after day, year after year, entirely on his own. What began as a lonely act of grief slowly became a living forest.

Today the woodland, known as the Molai forest after him, covers hundreds of hectares and has become a self-sustaining ecosystem, home to birds, deer, rhinos, elephants and even tigers that shelter within it. He built all of this by hand over decades, without machinery or a large team.

His quiet, decades-long labour drew the attention of scientists, filmmakers and environmentalists around the world. In 2015 the Government of India awarded him the Padma Shri. Jadav Payeng continues to plant and protect trees, insisting that the work of caring for the land is never truly finished.