The Vicente Ferrer Foundation has launched a campaign in collaboration with Las Provincias newspaper to foster a child over Christmas. Details can be obtained on 902540122. The cost is from 18€ per month.

If there is such a thing as a modern day saint, then it was probably Vicente Ferrer. In fact, the American magazine life once wrote an article referring to him as "The saint of Manmad".

Born in Barcelona in 1920 his childhood was spent between Barcelona and Gandía. In 1936, during the Civil War, he was drafted into the Republican army, at the age of 16. At the end of the war, he studied law.

He moved to India in 1952, having become a Jesuit priest. Between 1952 and 1969 he lived in the Manmad region (Bombay) where he was known as the "missionary of the wells" for the support he gave to the peasants in their construction, and where he created the "Rural Development Association", one of the first organisations dedicated to the development of rural areas in India.

When the Jesuits ordered him to leave India he refused and was expelled from the order. When the Indian government ordered his expulsion from the country because of his article entitled "The silent revolution", which appeared in the ‘Illustrated Weekly’, the most widely read weekly magazine in India, he was given 30 days to leave the country; although massive demonstrations made the authorities change their minds.

Moving to the state of Andra Pradesh, he again set up irrigation systems, this time in a desert area that was completely barren. The cooperative work method that he instituted there goes by the name of "linked brotherhood": help is given to each peasant in digging his own well, with material and food for the length of the work; when this is finished the peasant helps others in the same way.

Ferrer’s treatment of all Indians as equals put him in conflict with the rigid caste system due to his inclusion of the ‘Dalits’, the infamous untouchables, in his democratically run communities.

In Anantapur, which means ‘city of the infinite’ in the local language, with 1,100 villages and two million inhabitants, Ferrer founded the Rural Development Trust (RDT) in 1969 with the aim of finding solutions to the numerous problems of the rural community of Anantapur.

His work has led to the building of thousands of houses, several hospitals, family planning centres, centres for the handicapped and hundreds of schools.

In 1970 married Anne Perry, an English journalist, with whom he had three children.

Through the Women's Bank his organisation offers the necessary economic resources and advice to enable women to achieve economic independence.

When Vicente Ferrer first arrived in Anantapur, geologists predicted that the area would gradually become a desert, and advised the population to leave the region. In 1969 therefore, he set up a long-term ecological development plan with the aim of reversing soil erosion and the disappearance of the fertile topsoil by limiting the effects of torrential rain and increasing harvest yields, constructing reservoirs to irrigate crops during the dry season, reforesting the area to maintain the climatic balance and halt soil erosion, creating nurseries for plants, creating ecological bio-gas plants by using livestock excrements and digging wells to extract water for household use.

In the year 1996, he set up the Vicente Ferrer Foundation in Spain

Among his many awards are The Prince of Asturias Award for Peace in 1998 and the UNESCO award as Outstanding person in the history of the twentieth century 2001.

He died in June 2009.