Man creates forest single-handedly on Brahmaputra sand bar

ITANAGAR: A man in his mid-50s helped grow a huge forest on a sand bar in the middle of the mighty Brahmaputra in Assam's Jorhat district, which has caught attention of the government, tourists and film-makers.

The 30-year-long effort of Jadav Payeng, known among local people as 'Mulai', to grow the woods, stretching over an area of 550 hectares, has been hailed by the Assam forest department as 'examplary'.

Mulai began work on the forest in 1980 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 five KMs from Kokilamukh in Jorhat district.

Assistant conservator of forest Gunin Saikia, who is presently posted at Sivsagar district, said, "Mulai was one of the labourers who worked in our project which was completed after five years. He chose to stay back after the completion of the project as others left."

Mulai not only looked after the plants, but continued to plant more trees on his own effort slowly transforming the area into a big forest, Saikia noted.

"This is perhaps the biggest forest in the middle of a river," Saikia, who was instrumental in conceiving the project, said.

The department planned to launch another plantation programme in the area this year, Saikia said pointing out that there was ample scope to extend the forest by another 1,000 hectares.

Not only tourists are flocking to the woods in droves, a famous British film-maker Tom Robert went there two years back to shoot one of his films.

The forest, known in Assamese as "Mulai Kathoni" or Mulai forest, houses around four tigers, three rhinoceros, over a hundred deer and rabbits besides apes and innumerable varieties of birds, including a large number of vultures.

It has several thousand trees among which are valcol, arjun, ejar, goldmohur, koroi, moj and himolu. There are bamboo trees too covering an area of over 300 hectares.