page_title: Jadav Payeng
section_title: In popular culture
hierarchical_section_title: Jadav Payeng / In popular culture
caption_attribution_description: English: An illustration from 'Jadav and the Tree-Place', an open-source children's book about the Indian conservationist Jadav 'Molai' Payeng.
context_page_description: In 1979, Payeng, then 16, 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 started working on the forest in 1979 when the social forestry division of Golaghat district launched a scheme of tree plantation on 200 hectares at Aruna Chapori situated at a distance of 5 km from Kokilamukh in Jorhat district. Molai was one of the labourers who worked in that project which was completed after five years. He chose to stay back after the completion of the project even after other workers left. 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. Molai forest is also home to monkeys and several varieties of birds, including a large number of vultures. There are several thousand trees, including valcol, arjun, ejar, goldmohur, koroi, moj and himolu. Bamboo covers an area of over 300 hectares.
context_section_description: Payeng has been the subject of a number of documentaries in the recent years. A locally made film documentary, produced by Jitu Kalita in 2012, The Molai Forest, was screened at the Jawaharlal Nehru University. Jitu Kalita, who lives near Payeng's house, has also been featured and given recognition for good reporting by projecting the life of Payeng through his documentary.
  The 2013 film documentary Foresting life, directed by the Indian documentary filmmaker Aarti Shrivastava, celebrates the life and work of Jadav Payeng in the Molai forest. These are also the focus of William Douglas McMaster's 2013 film documentary Forest Man. With US$8,327 pledged on its Kickstarter campaign, the film was brought to completion and taken to a number of film festivals. It was awarded the Best Documentary prize at the Emerging Filmmaker Showcase in the American Pavilion at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.
  Payeng is also the subject of the children's book Jadav and the Tree-Place, written and illustrated by Vinayak Varma. The book was published by the open-source children's publishing platform StoryWeaver, and its production was funded by a grant from the Oracle Giving Initiative.
  He is also mentioned in the book 'Boys will be boys' by Aparna Jain
caption: An illustration of Jadav Payeng, from the biographical children's book Jadav and the Tree-Place[23] by Vinayak Varma
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