Many farm families in western India faced tough choices: try to cultivate land that is eroded by rain and then parched by drought every year or migrate to urban slums in search of sustenance. Fr. Hans Bacher, SJ, has shown them that by working together they can create a third choice.

You're a farmer in a place where it does not rain for months at a time, year after year, like clockwork. Then, during the monsoon, the months when it does rain, it comes down in buckets. Every year it washes more and more of your land away. All of your good soil is carried away by flash floods to some river on its way to an ocean. What land is left is so thin that almost nothing will grow on it. When you look out over your land, you see an occasional green plant that has managed to survive. But mostly you see reddish brown rocks.

That's not all. Your well, your only source of water, runs dry. Your cows can't graze, and they have no water -- and neither do you. You dig your well deeper, and sometimes that gets to a new underground water level, but not always.

You live in western India in an area east of Bombay, or Mumbai, as they now call it. Maybe you should pack up what you can, sell the rest, except for one cow, for whatever you can get. Then you could hitch the cow to a cart and head for Mumbai. It can't be worse than here.

Yes, it can. You have no experience or skills useful in urban life. So you will be lucky to find a hut in a slum, maybe the one at the end of the airport runway, the busiest in India, where the peak hours for 747s are from midnight to 6:00 a.m. If you and your sons work hard all day, provided you can find work, you may be able to pay the rent for the hut and subsist on some rice. But if you and your sons can't earn enough, you may have to let your wife or your teenage daughters go to work at night as prostitutes. And all the while, you are just getting by. Putting something aside for the future is only a dream. Maybe one of the family members will meet one of Mother Teresa's Missionaries of Charity; they work to help people forced to live in slums like those near the Mumbai airport. But even they can't do everything.

Terraces cut into land or built with stones slow down the runoff from India's monsoon rains. Erosion slows, ground cover grows. The results are dramatic. (See below!) Green used to be a rare color in the fields east of Bombay, or Mumbai, as it is now called. The terracing that has trapped water and allowed such growth has also raised the water table; wells once dry are filling up.

Breaking the cycle

Some years ago Fr. Hans Bacher, a Swiss Jesuit, volunteered to work in India. After he had been in the rural area east of Mumbai for several years, he recognized not only the tragic cycle but also a potential way of breaking it. No farmer could do it alone, but something was possible if every farmer in a watershed would cooperate.

Fr. Bacher explained to the farmers that a watershed is an area of land in which all the rainwater is drained by one stream. A watershed does not necessarily coincide with land ownership boundaries or political boundaries. It is set by the contour of the land: the hills and the valleys. The boundary between two watersheds usually runs along the tops of hills; rain falling on one side of the boundary flows towards one stream, and rain falling on the other side flows to a different stream.

Once the farmers grasped the concept of a watershed and agreed to cooperate, work could begin. India's monsoons often act like flash floods that sweep away everything in front of them. So the first step had to be harnessing the rains. Fr. Bacher realized that this could be done with heavy earth-moving equipment if he had it. Without it, the hand labor of unskilled workers would be necessary. Fr. Bacher chose the second option even though it would take longer. From the start he wanted to involve the farmers in whatever would have to be done. Then, if he succeeded, the results would be theirs and not the effort of a relief agency handed to the occupants of the land upon completion.

To harness the monsoon rains, two similar methods were used, depending on how rocky the ground was. If the surface soil had already been mostly washed away and the rocky substratum was now the surface, teams of people were engaged to move the rocks by hand into a series of concentric circles or arcs beginning at the highest elevation and spreading to the lowest. If the tillable soil was still present, trenches about a foot deep were dug in the same pattern. Along with the rock barriers or the trenches, seeds for grasses that could withstand the poor soil and the lack of rainfall were planted.

Rather than spending donations on heavy earth-moving equipment, Frs. Bacher and Lobo employ the very farmers their land-stabilization program benefits, engendering an important sense of ownership in the project.

When the next monsoon rains arrived, the rock barriers and the trenches did their work well. The water did not rush down the slopes as before. Most of it was slowed and stayed longer on the sides of the hills. Consequently, much of it seeped into the ground and began to replenish the wells. The grasses grew and could be harvested as fodder for cattle. Although it would take several monsoon seasons to bring a watershed back to reasonable health and productivity, the improved flow of water from the wells and the green in the fields were signs of change in the offing.

It did not take the farmers long to recognize that the old cycle could be broken in their watershed. Soon, those who owned land in neighboring watersheds were asking for similar help. The concept is now spreading to many watersheds in the State of Maharashtra east of Mumbai.

The watershed project is cheap compared to the human cost of those slums in Mumbai. But it is not inexpensive. Fr. Bacher obtained funding from donors in Germany. After the project had spread to thousands of farms in hundreds of watersheds, the German government acknowledged the prudent and fruitful use he had made of the gifts they had given him by awarding him its highest civilian decoration.

The watershed project is still growing today and is now bigger than anyone could have imagined at the beginning. Today the project uses computers to map out more precisely the watersheds in which it is already working and those in which there could be good prospects of success.

For all of these watersheds, the computer system has data on the surface contours, the grades of the slopes, the height of the water table, the types of soil, the rocky substrata, local weather conditions, and current usage of the land. With this and other information from external sources, it can design a specific development plan for each watershed. No two development programs are likely to be identical, but all still share one common point: the necessity of local cooperation before any work may start.

Fr. Bacher has not retired. But he has turned over the project office to an Indian Jesuit, Fr. Crispino Lobo. Some of Fr. Lobo's reports have been published by the World Bank as an example for other efforts, and he will be an exhibitor at a world's fair this year in Hanover, Germany. Fr. Lobo has learned well from Fr. Bacher. Like him, Fr. Lobo stresses the importance of cooperative effort in a self-help system such as the watershed program. No one farmer could do this for himself by himself, and one or two uncooperative neighbors could ruin the whole project for all in the watershed area. But when everyone cooperates, they cheat the airport slums of Mumbai. And simultaneously regain their own self-esteem.