Forest Man, Billionaire Magazine

Forest Man, Billionaire Magazine

Jadav ‘Molai’ Payeng, a Mising tribesman in India, began planting seeds and bamboo shoots on a deserted sandbar on Majuli Island in Assam in 1979. That summer, he stumbled on the freakish sight of hundreds of snakes floating ashore and dying in the scorching sun after floods washed them onto the banks of the Brahmaputra River. “When I saw it, I thought we will also die this way in the heat, without any tree cover,” says Payeng, who was only 16 years old at the time. “I sat down and wept, and in the grief for those dead snakes, I created this forest.