We cannot understand the eating habits of a population by looking at what people eat in restaurants. We would be looking at the wrong places because most people do not eat in restaurants. Similarly, we cannot hope to understand the workplaces of the future by looking at corporations. Because corporations as we know them will not be the workplaces of the future. Therefore, if we want to understand what the workplaces of the future will be like, we will have to look outside business corporations.

As I sit here in my corner office in a downtown Mumbai office block, I look out on rows of roadside stalls from one window, and a fishing community from the other. I see hundreds of people down there swarming around at their work, many times more than the numbers in my office. And this in downtown Mumbai. A hundred miles from here, there are many millions more engaged in what we would call the 'unorganised sector', which accounts for more than 90 per cent of the employment in the country.

Charles Handy predicts that fewer and fewer people will work in large corporations in the developed economies in the future. In Britain, by 1996, 67 per cent of registered businesses had only one employee, the owner, and only 11 per cent of businesses employed more than five people. In India too, the trend is towards lesser employment in large businesses and government as they 'downsize' their workforces.

Many of those who are displaced from large organisations will create small enterprises, most likely service enterprises. And some will call themselves 'consultants'. For many of these people, workplace will be their home from where they will operate with a cell phone and a computer. Bill Gates had predicted that by 2050, half of the working population would be working from home. I see four trends driving the changes:

• Telecommunications and computers will increasingly enable people-including farmers, fishermen, and small traders-to change the way they work. As the use of technology spreads, many more will do so.

• Getting financed will be easier for small enterprises. Many banks recognise the opportunities for micro-lending. Therefore, many more smaller ventures will be born.

• There will be increased participation in decision-making at the grassroots levels. Not only will this be propelled by the first two trends, but it will also be reinforced by the belief that empowerment will improve productivity.

• The fourth is the downsizing of large enterprises, which will result in the growth of small enterprises and solo workers.

• Putting all this together, I see three kinds of workplaces in which the majority of people will work 25 years into the future. The first is small enterprises in both rural and urban settings. In many of these enterprises, the members will not work on the premises. They will, like the dabbawallas of Mumbai, be out in the streets or, like the members of milk cooperatives, on their farms. There will be at least three significant changes in the way such enterprises will operate: One, much larger numbers of women will participate in them. Two, computers and communication technologies will play an important role in their operations. And, three, the governance systems in these enterprises will be participatory: there may be one owner, or many owners, but the workers will be involved in many decisions.

The second important workplace will be the home. More housewives will get involved with ways to supplement the family income, and many more people will choose to or be compelled to break out on their own. Most of these people will create workspaces in their homes to carry out their work efficiently.

This inexorable trend towards smaller, and even one-person organisations, will create a need for these micro-enterprises to network with each other. Some of this networking will take place over telephones and computers. But I imagine that a lot of it will have to be done face-to-face periodically. Therefore, another important workplace will be spaces in which meetings and workshops will take place.

The future, as someone said, is here now; only, we have not noticed it yet.