Timbaktu Collective is a collective of activists, who had been working in different voluntary organisations for one to two decades. During this involvement, individual members of the Collective had been variously involved in participatory training, cultural action, people's theatre, education, documentation, organising rural poor, campaigns, networking and support services. As a group of activists, they had been meeting at various fora, and had, over a period of time shared a critique of modern developments in the global and local context, as well as their own work. These discussions and reflections on their work, exposed the inadequacies of a purely class understanding of today's society on which rested - the logic and strategy of most of their work.

The idea at that time was to initiate an experiment in creating an agro-forest habitat. With this in mind, a 32 acre piece of degraded land in Anantapur District of Andhra Pradesh was purchased with a total personal fund of Rs. 1,10,000 and two full time workers employed. This land was named Timbaktu.

From such humble beginnings, the Collective has grown to a medium sized organisation with 60 full time working members, 6 part time workers, 3 volunteers, 5 trainees and an annual budget of approximately Rs. 60 lakhs.