Our vision is to stop the degradation of the land in Anantapur district and to find ways to reverse it. We want to green the hills and the land. We want to develop alternative lifestyles. Lifestyles that are sustainable and provide more liberty and happiness, than those based upon exploitation. The small farmers see their land degrade and the wells drying up, but they don't know what to do, so they just continue their patterns of self-destruction. We want to find a path that leads out of this vicious circle, not without but together with them.

The poorest are always those who are struck first and hardest by economic struggles. Our focus is to help the marginalised people: the women, the Dalits, the small farmers, the wage labourers, the poor, those who otherwise disappear in some statistics about poverty, malnourishment, or illiteracy. We want to help the people to connect again with their environment, with their land, with their tradition and culture, with nature and their community.

The purpose of the Timbaktu Collective is to enable rural children, women and men to live with dignity, self-respect and knowledge, rooted in native wisdom, traditional industry, crafts and arts, in a meaningful and joyous manner.

The values of the Timbaktu Collective are

• Celebration of Life
• Faith in people and their wisdom
• Cooperation
• Excellence

Our objectives are

• To rejuvenate village communities by means of organising the common people to take responsibility of village development - Local self governance;
• To regenerate the natural resources by organising the common people to manage their own natural resources;
• To revitalise local cultures and lifestyles by encouraging people to talk about their old stories and enact their cultural art forms;
• To organise and empower women by means of setting up alternative banking systems, learning to read and write, taking up issues that pertain to women and their problems particularly youth and Dalits through training and meetings
• To create spaces and learning centres for children so that they may experience a childhood by means of alternative learning systems; and
• To participate in and create networks of voluntary, civil society, community based and mass organisations.

Timbaktu Collective was founded by a group of activists in 1990 who had been working in different voluntary organisations for more than a decade. Individual members of the Collective have been involved in various ways in attempts to create a just and participative society. Some have been involved in cultural action and people's theatre, others in education, documentation, campaigns for organising rural poor and women's issues.

All the members have over the years shared a critique of modern developments in the global and local contexts. Their work over the years have shown them the inadequacies of a purely class based understanding of today's society on which rested the logic and strategy of most of their earlier work. The main areas of their critique have been on the question of sustainability and ecology, the all pervasive market, and the imperative of building alternative institutions and practices.

The planet has never been as fragile and under attack as it today. Industrial and post industrial societies through their unsustainable exploitation of Nature's resources have pushed the earth to the precipice of disaster.

Development strategies have destroyed natural habitats turning verdant forests into wastelands. Today more than half of the country's land area is estimated unfit for any productive activity. This destruction often caused by large development projects has shattered the lifestyles of large sections of rural and tribal communities that have been dependent on natural resources for their survival. Since independence over 300 million of them have been uprooted from their homes, left to fend for themselves in urban slums.

Those in the rural areas who have land assets have through faulty agricultural practices increased their dependence on external inputs for their livelihoods. Increased cultivation of cash crops with their unsustainable exploitation of water sources has brought short term benefits to a few at the cost of many and the resource base that supports their activities.

This destruction of the natural base has been levered by a global market whose avarice for exchange of surplus, gobbles natural resources with scant respect for its renewability or the future. The attendant consumerism has controlled tastes, changed lifestyles, cropping patterns, habitats and rituals. This alienating market with its destructive science and technology today transcends class, and affects capitalists and socialists alike, bringing in its wake a slow poisoning of everything that sustains life on this planet.

Societies that have understood better the harmful effects of extraction of surplus for a few have worked towards a more equitable distribution of resources through revolutions. However, post revolutionary societies have been incapable of addressing the slow poisoning that sustains life on this planet or even the more basic problem of building sustainable democratic institutions, be it in the field of politics, food, health or shelter.

The members of the Collective have been witness to these phenomena in the district of Anantapur, and have noticed the rapid desertification of the land. They have found that their attempts to organise the poor peasants towards a more equitable pattern of distribution makes but little impact on rural society, if an ecological vision is absent and if they are not part of any of nature's productive processes.

It is with this in view that the Collective has acquired 32 acres land to recreate a model. While these were their main areas of critique when they started the Collective, they have begun to recognize, through their work and discussions, the need to question the very concept of Development in the following years. The symptoms of widespread inequality that `development' was supposed to have addressed has as its basis a more fundamental flaw in its concepts. It has been based on a vision of a world order where the West, and USA in particular, would rank first with the rest of the nations catching up. It has increased social polarization within the country along with disparities amongst countries.

The market, state and science have been the great universalizing powers that have occupied the mental space in which people dream and act, replacing it by western imagery. The "success" of `development' has led to tremendous loss of diversity through a cultural monoculture that has tried to eliminate the innumerable varieties of being human, turning the world into a place deprived of adventure and surprise. This spreading monocultural concept has eroded viable alternatives and dangerously crippled humankind's capacity to meet an increasingly different future with creative responses, impoverished the potential for cultural evolution.
The metaphor of `development' has expanded the reign of scarcity for a large section of the people, making them into risk cultures, by making "economic man", the leading actor. He creates a series of others - tribals, women, children, future generations, nature, minorities etc. in his unthinking march towards ever increasing growth, yields and progress. Though he is contemptuous of it he scavenges from it to pursue his self-interest. Based on a false history of the other, the economic man perpetuates the myth of constant advance, standardizing diversity and dissolving embeddedness.

The effect of these interrelated processes has been severe if not catastrophic to communities and the "common man" in rural areas. It is not just an urban phenomenon of suffocating pollution or spreading slums or a global phenomenon of global warming or depletion of ozone layers.

Small peasants, for example, who despite seeing their lands degenerate, queue for exotic seeds, subsidy and chemicals, sending them into a vortex of debt. People have lost or are losing faith in their own knowledges and cultures, gleaned and distilled from centuries of interaction with nature. Vibrant and stable communities have, or are in the process of, loosing their dynamic stability, their regenerative capabilities.

Having lost faith in their skills, their knowledge systems, they are increasingly looking to the government for answers and inputs, trading their self respect for few crumbs of doles that pass through many hands before it reaches them. The relationship of a community to an outsider has changed from one based on trust and interrelatedness to one of client-patron where the villager has become a passive recipient of inputs that he cannot understand, let alone internalize.

The community becomes a hinterland for labour and the villager a passive participant interacting undialectically with the outside world. In short the common man has been separated from his "commons".

All this points out to the imperative of a radical change in strategy and approach and the need for building in whatever limited manner, autonomous institutions which cover different fields of public life, but embody within its structure and meaning, principles of just, peaceful, sustainable and democratic societies. There is a need to recover the notions of the commons, to build communities, to regenerate peoples spaces.

Timbaktu Collective is one such nucleus of such a change in strategy. Timbaktu hopes to participate in the arrival and celebration of the new commons. The commons are presently struggling to limit the economic invasion of their lives. Their resistance is not a mechanical reaction but a creative reconstruction of the basic forms of social interaction.

Many of these interactions have appeared only in recent times and the failure of both industrial societies and the remnants of traditional forms of interactions to relocate destroyed cultures has necessitated new forms of interactions. Interactions that look at education by re-embedding learning in culture, that see health as the autonomous ability to cope with one's environment, regenerating their own healing capability. This process of reconstruction poses great challenges for everybody, but also offers a creative opportunity for regeneration and mutually supportive interactions.

The people of the new commons do not assume unlimited ends, since their ends are the other side of their means, their direct expression. The common man of the commons looks for no more than free spaces or limited support for his initiatives. Timbaktu hopes to provide such spaces for indigenous initiatives by hoping to create such a common, to celebrate the diversity in its area and to celebrate life.

The land at Timbaktu is similar to, if not worse than, the land of the marginal peasants of the district. It is undulating and has suffered severe sand casting and soil erosion and was desolate and barren.

Timbaktu is envisaged as an agro-forest habitat. It is an attempt to create an alternative eco-sensitive community. A community while caring for nature and tending to its basic needs can demonstrate a sustainable, alternative, decentralized, self-respecting, non-alienating way of life for all sections of the society. Such a community can be the only starting point for building a just and peaceful world, as any vision of such a world, without an ecological perspective is vacuous.

At Timbaktu therefore, they see their tasks as revitalising cosmologies, caring for the Earth and leaving it in a better shape than they inherited. To build this agro-forest habitat the Collective has borrowed from the methods of Natural farming, Permaculture and most importantly Native wisdom. It has relied on resources available among the poor i.e., labour, traditional knowledge and local genetic resources with limited input from the outside.

Timbaktu is also an activists retreat - as a nucleus of ideas, reflection and action and a disseminator of its vision through the many action groups working around it. The emphasis at Timbaktu is on actually working out an alternative in their own lives before sharing it with the community around them. The Collective hopes to through its work bring in greater depth and meaning and a new dimension to the work of the members have hitherto been doing. The Collective has been with the rural poor protecting the fragile environments both at Timbaktu and the areas adjoining it.

Timbaktu also houses an alternative school for children of the villages nearby and activists children and a nursery for indigenous plant species. Timbaktu hopes to function as a healing centre and as a space for a cultural centre, a shelter for women-in-distress, a centre for research, training and dissemination of techniques of alternative agriculture - all in good time.

The habitat of the Collective has developed over the years. Its philosophy and ambiance form the reference point for other works. The Collective hopes to participate actively in practical and sustainable agricultural practices while developing the natural resource base for peoples industries. Industries that are sustaining and that can provide sources of income for the Collective and the people around it.

The Collective believes that decentralized institutions are only developed through decentralized actions, the people will have to work out these alternatives themselves. The Collective hopes to build alternative autonomous institutions that would demonstrate these alternatives in practice. It is an alternative that seeks to make people believe in themselves, and wrest the initiative of social change in their own hands, within their own milieu rather than abdicate it to a state, which they have to constantly fight with or extend their begging bowl before.

The Collective hopes to promote alternative institutions that strengthen indigenous initiatives with their basis on interrelatedness, lack of hierarchy, internal democracy and trust. Through its actions the Collective hopes to challenge the dominant ideas that currently prevail on technology - its genesis, research and development, its innovation and diffusion, the notion of community and community worker and the support structures necessary for their growth.

The Collective's emphasis would be on empirical research at the field and believes that it is only through a continuous process of sharing and interaction between the lab and the land, the teacher and the student, the community worker and the community that any meaningful action can find proper roots. The Collective lays no claims to certainty of knowledge or answers but instead emphasises learning and action. The Collective thus does not look at the experiment outside of itself.

The members of the Collective see themselves not as providers of answers or inputs to the underprivileged poor but as participants in the search for a collective vision for good life that includes all human and nonhuman life forms. The Collective does not claim to have answers that they would like to philanthropically diffuse but as community workers and scientists seeking solutions to innovative forms of social interactions.