One Man Planted Trees on a Dead Sandbar in India for 40 Years — Now It's a 550-Hectare Forest

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One Man Planted Trees on a Dead Sandbar in India for 40 Years — Now It's a 550-Hectare Forest

In 1979, after a Brahmaputra flood in Assam, a teenager from the Mising tribe found a bare sandbar covered in snakes that had died in the heat. The forest department told him nothing would grow there. Jadav "Molai" Payeng started planting anyway: bamboo first, then trees, mostly alone, for four decades.

Today the Molai forest covers around 550 hectares, bigger than Central Park. Bengal tigers, one-horned rhinos, deer, vultures and a herd of around a hundred wild elephants use it. This video follows how a forest can grow on river sand, in what order, and why the order matters. It also covers the hard part: the 2008 elephant raid that nearly got the forest cut down, poachers, the lack of legal protection, and what one forest can and cannot do against a river that has eaten thousands of square kilometres of Assam.

Chapters:
0:00 The sandbar where the snakes died
1:41 The river that eats land
3:55 Bamboo and a boy
5:05 Three years of help
6:20 How you grow a forest on sand
8:50 The animals came back
10:38 The day they found it
12:20 Forest Man of India
13:13 The honest part
15:24 The same idea elsewhere
17:40 What the sand remembered