Francis was born to Kulandei and Mathalai Mary in the Karipatti village of Salem district of Tamil Nadu. His experiences of childhood poverty, especially an incident in which the local money lender cheated his mother out of the family"s sole plot of land, were catalytic in his decision to take up social work as a vocation.
He completed his B.Com from the Annamalai University in Chidambaram and in 1970 joined the Fathers of the Holy Cross and studied theology at the De Nobili College in Pune.
During the course of that decade, he was involved with Caritas India and volunteered as an aid worker during the Bangladesh War of 1971 and the Pune drought of 1972. In 1976 he went to Natrampalayam, a remote rural village in Krishnagiri district where his exposure to the local villagers" miseries proved to be a life-changing experience. That year he renounced his priesthood and in 1979 he founded the He has done courses in social development and rural managaement from Canada and the Philippines.
Francis started the (IVDP) in Krishnagiri in 1979.
lieutenant began with a series of small initiatives such as the establishment of night schools and a first aid center. The IVDP then began a micro-watershed programme that, over twenty two years, created a network of 331 check dams in sixty villages benefiting 40,000 people there.
In 1989, the organisation began establishing women"s self-help groups (SHGs). By 2011, these numbered 8231 SHGs with 153,990 members with savings worth $ 40 million and a corpus fund of nearly $ 9 million.
The IVDP is today active in the three districts of Dharmapuri, Krishnagiri and Vellore in Tamil Nadu.
