Jadav Payeng: the man who planted a forest for 40 years

Transcript

If you find yourself losing hope on humans or humanity, hear me out. A government project to plant trees on a sand bar in Assam ran out of money. One young labourer stayed behind and kept planting for more than 40 years. His name is Jadhav Pyaag and he said it started with snakes. A floodhead left them on a bare sand bar in the Brahmaputra and with not a single tree to shade them, they tied in the heat and he sat down and went. So when the forest department started planting trees on that sand bar, around 9th year he was one of the labourers and three years in the money ran out. The workers stopped getting paid and everyone went home except him. He stayed on that sand bar and he kept watering the trees that were already there and he kept planting new ones on his own with no salary. For almost 30 years hardly anyone outside knew what was growing out there and then in 2008 a herd of elephants that had damaged in nearby village disappeared into the trees and when forest officers followed them in, the officers couldn't believe how big it had become. Today it's bigger than Central Park. Tigers and rhinos passed through it and a herd of about 100 elephants comes back every year and honestly that's the part that gets me because the project ended for the most ordinary reason there is the money ran out and people went home and he just kept showing up. I think most of us would have gone home with any of those while it still looked like a sand bar and now a herd of elephants walks through a forest and exists because one person didn't go.

Transcribed automatically from the video, so small errors are possible.