He started working 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 5 km from Kokilamukh in Jorhat district.

Molai (pet name) was one of the labourers who worked in that project which was completed after five years. He has single-handedly grown a sprawling forest on a 550-hectare sandbar in the middle of the Brahmaputra. Leaving behind his education and home, he started living on the sandbar and after a few years the sandbar transformed into a bamboo thicket. The forest, which came to be known as Molai forest, now houses Bengal tigers, Indian rhinoceros, over 100 deer and rabbits besides apes and several varieties of birds, including a large number of vultures. His efforts became known to the authorities in 2008, when forest department officials went to the area in search of a herd of 115 elephants that had retreated into the forest after damaging property in the village of Aruna Chapori, which is about 1.5 km from the forest. Jadav Payeng belongs to the Mishing tribe in Assam, India. He lives in a small hut in the forest along with his wife Binita and three children.

Payeng has been the subject of a number of documentaries in the recent years. William Douglas McMaster’s 2013 film documentary Forest Man is one of them. The film was taken to a number of film festivals and was awarded the Best Documentary prize at the Emerging Filmmaker Showcase in the American Pavilion at the 2014 Cannes Film Festival.

Jadav Payeng was honoured at a public function arranged by the School of Environmental Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University on 22 April 2012 for his remarkable achievement. JNU vice-chancellor Sudhir Kumar Sopory named Jadav Payeng as “Forest Man of India”. In October 2013, he was honoured at Indian Institute of Forest Management during their annual event Coalescence. He has been awarded the Padmashree for the year