Jadav Payeng
Environmentalist, nature scientist
Jadav "Molai" Payeng (born 31 October 1959) is a forest conservationist from Majuli, in the Indian state of Assam. He is popularly known as the Forest Man of India. Over the course of several decades, he has planted and tended trees on a sandbar of the river Brahmaputra turning it into a forest reserve. The forest, called Molai forest after him, is located near Kokilamukh of Jorhat, Assam, India and encompasses an area of about 1,360 acres (550 ha). In 2015, he was honoured with Padma Shri, the fourth highest civilian award in India. He was born in the indigenous Mising tribe of Assam.
Career
In 1979, Payeng encountered a large number of snakes that had died due to excessive heat after floods washed them onto the tree-less sandbar. That is when he planted around 20 bamboo seedlings on the sandbar. He not only looked after the plants, but continued to plant more trees on his own, in an effort to transform the area into a forest.
The forest, which came to be known as Molai forest, now houses Bengal tigers, Indian rhinoceros, and over 100 deer and rabbits.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3533635. VIAF identifies the subject as 5034149489159693810007. The Library of Congress control number is n2017241848. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1959, 2015 and 1979.
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This entry incorporates text from “Jadav Payeng” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.