If I were to ask someone to name a current world issue, they would probably say global warming, climate change or deforestation. Everyone is aware of these issues but not many people actually contribute to solving these issues. It can be difficult to find inspiration because we feel that we cannot make an actual difference all alone. Well, there are some people who have made a forest worth of a difference all alone.
Jadav ‘Molai’ Payeng is an environmental activist from the Mising tribe in Assam. He has been given the nickname ‘The Forest Man of India’. To see how he got this nickname we need to travel back in time to 1979, when Payeng was just 16 years old.
Payeng once came across a large number of snakes that got washed away by a flood onto a treeless sand bank and died due to excessive heat. He then wondered- What if this started happening to people? So, he decided to plant 20 bamboo seeds on that sandbank. Due to this experience, he joined a scheme of a 200-hectare tree plantation. He worked there for five years until the task was completed. Instead of leaving he stayed back there alone. He looked after the plants and planted even more trees there to make it a forest. Now after almost 40 years of hard work the forest encompasses an area of over 550 hectares. It houses Bengal tigers, elephants, deer, rhinoceros, rabbits and a large variety of monkeys and birds.
This forest is called the ‘Molai Forest’ which is named after him. He was honoured with the Padma Shri in 2015. Payeng put the forest above his own needs, worked hard for 40 years and still is known by very few people. Even after all he has done, he makes a meagre income by selling cattle and buffalo milk.
It is very easy for us to say that we don’t have the infrastructure to solve deforestation and Global Warming, but we fail to realize how much we really can do to help but people like Payeng are a great inspiration to us and help us realize that we truly can make a difference ourselves, and all we need is the drive to do it.
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