1 In 1979, a sixteen-year-old boy named Jadav Payeng found something terrible on a sandbar in the Brahmaputra River in India. After a big flood, hundreds of snakes had died on the hot sand. There were no trees to give them shade. Jadav was shocked. He understood that without trees, animals could not survive there.
2 Jadav decided to do something about it. He planted twenty bamboo plants on the sandbar. Nobody helped him, and many people thought he was wasting his time. Some people even laughed at him. But every day, he came back to water his plants and to plant new ones. He carried water from the river by hand, and he brought red ants from his village to make the soil better.
3 Year after year, the small trees grew, and Jadav kept planting. He did all this work alone, for more than thirty years. Slowly, the empty sandbar became a forest. Today, the forest covers more than 500 hectares, which is bigger than Central Park in New York. It is called the Molai Forest, after Jadav's nickname.
4 The forest is now home to many animals. Deer, rabbits, monkeys and many kinds of birds live there. Even elephants visit it every year, and tigers and rhinos have been seen there too. The forest also protects the island from floods, because the roots of the trees hold the soil. Scientists who visited the forest were amazed that one man had created it.
5 In 2015, the government of India gave Jadav one of the country's highest awards. People now call him “the Forest Man of India.” When people ask him why he did it, his answer is simple: “If we cut the trees, we will not survive. Nature gives us everything, so we must protect it.”