How Do I Fix a System That’s Working Perfectly Fine?

In this post, using the theory of POSIWID and my experience of surviving the India post bureaucracy, I propose that we need to shift our perspective and discourse from fixing the systems to dismantling and changing the current systems of power.

Published: 8/29/2025

Last summer, after two years in Europe, I returned home to India seeking solace in familiar surroundings and people. Instead, I found myself enraged—not by open failures, but by the insidious consistency of dysfunction. The educational system that fails our poorest children, hospitals out of reach, streets choked with pollution and poor AQI, the police bogged down in bureaucracy—all of it. But the frustration wasn’t in the chaos; it was how methodically everything stays broken.

A conversation with a dear friend introduced me to POSIWID—Purpose of a System Is What It Does. Unlike ideological critiques pitting people’s stated intent against reality, POSIWID invites a more disturbing possibility: perhaps the system isn’t broken; perhaps it’s working exactly as intended.

Think about it: if our systems—from public transportation to basic sanitation—truly failed by accident, such failures would be unpredictable. Some days abundance for the needy, other days none at all, traffic sometimes magically clearing. But that randomness is absent. There’s a consistent pattern: the poor remain deprived; the wealthy stay secure. That predictability makes dysfunction ripe for exploitation.

One day, I was even more convinced of POSIWID when I tried sending a postal package to a friend. India Post’s server was down the entire day. I had checked the prices of private services like DHL and Blue Dart online the day before, but on that day, as India Post remained non-functional, the prices of those very services skyrocketed. This wasn’t a one-off—India Post offices had been down consistently over the past few months, predictably so, yet no solution was ever offered. Very ironically, an India Post staff member even advised me that it would be better if I simply went to a private company like DHL or Blue Dart to send my package.

Privatization as the Unseen Benefactor of Public Failure

In countries like India, capital holds power and controls the narrative. Government services, when decent, benefit the collective. But when they falter, opportunities arise. And it’s not always the poor who moan the loudest—it’s the capitalists who stand to gain from their failure.

The logic is quite simple: when public enterprises make money (say, from postal services, railways, or telecom), those earnings are reinvested in infrastructure, schools, transport, universal healthcare. These are public goods—shared, durable, improving equity.

By contrast, private capital funnels profits back into select hands of the stakeholders. Billionaires build sky-villas like Ambani’s Antilia, own fleets of private jets, yachts, luxury cars. The wealth is concentrated; very little trickles down. The system ensures what POSIWID suggests: public failure means private profit.

The Myth of Benevolent Capital

Even when capitalists wear the mask of philanthropists, the scales seldom balance.

Tata’s Charity vs Real Funding

The Tata Trusts are widely praised, and indeed they hold roughly 66 percent of Tata Sons’ equity, ensuring that dividends flow into philanthropic work (Forbes India). Yet much of what the public attributes to them—institutes like IISc and TIFR—are, in fact, majorly funded by the Indian government.

IISc—the Indian Institute of Science, founded in 1909—was created via a tripartite model between the Tatas, the Government of India, and the Government of Mysore (Tata, Wikipedia).

TIFR—the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research, founded in 1945—was launched by Homi Bhabha with help from J.R.D. Tata, but is today a National Centre under the Department of Atomic Energy (Wikipedia, TIFR).

These institutions are rightly lauded—but it’s misleading to credit the Tatas. As POSIWID reminds us: by claiming credit, even symbolic benefactors reinforce the façade of benevolence, diverting attention from systemic government funding, and absolving the wealthy from broader responsibility.

How Much Do Tatas Truly Give?

There’s limited public data on exactly what fraction of the Trusts’ corpus goes toward charity versus being reinvested or retained. But consider:

Tata Trust is One of the world’s wealthiest foundations whose profits are derived from their control of Tata Sons The core asset of Tata Trusts is their 66% majority ownership of Tata Sons, the Tata Group’s holding company. Valuations of Tata Sons vary depending on methodology and whether a holding-company discount is applied:Almost a decade ago, estimates (likely from traditional valuation models) put Tata Trusts’ holding at USD 42–43 billion (~₹3.7–₹3.8 lakh crore) (The Economic Times).

More recently, reflective of the conglomerate’s expanded footprint, one source describes the Tata Group as a $165 billion (~₹14.5 lakh crore) enterprise, indirectly implying the Trusts’ share could be in that range—though this is the value of the conglomerate, not necessarily liquid corpus (Reuters, Fortune India).

Dividend income as a proxy for financial strength

In fiscal year 2023–24, Tata Trusts received ₹933 crore (~USD 110 million) in dividend income from Tata Sons—an indicator of the scale of income-generating assets under their control (Fortune India).

Dividends are where most of their expendable income comes from, some of which goes towards charity.

In contrast:

In fiscal year 2022–23, the Tata Trusts disbursed approximately ₹581 crore (~US$70 million) across sectors like healthcare, education, and rural development (KB Sidhu).

Historically, in 2015–16, the Trusts spent around ₹750 crore (~US$125 million) on philanthropic activities (The Times of India).

A decade earlier, over a two-year period, they contributed a little more than ₹1,000 crore (~$114 million) toward social projects, particularly in health interventions (The Economic Times)

Putting it in perspective: Even by conservative estimates, Tata Trusts are donating well under 0.5% of their corpus each year.

To grasp what that means in practical terms—let’s compare with just one major public project like the Delhi Metro, funded by the Indian government.

The Delhi Metro Project:

The combined cost of Delhi Metro’s Phase I, II, and III stands at approximately ₹71,875 crore (~$8.2 billion) (Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs).

At the Tata Trusts’ current level of annual disbursements of ₹581 crore (~$66 million) per year, it would take them about 124 years to fund the equivalent of Delhi Metro Phases I through III.

Even if we use the higher charitable outlay of ₹750 crore (~$85.4 million) per year, it would still take around 96 years to reach that benchmark.

Which means that the charity from Tatas is so negligible that one can tell they are not concerned about investing in the public good of the country.

Just that we are drowning in numbers, let me give you some more:

The total revenue of Tata Motors, one of the largest competitors to public transport in India, stood at ₹4,39,695 crore ($50 billion) in FY 2025, with a net profit of ₹22,991 crore ($2.6 billion)—even after a decline from ₹31,106.95 crore (~$3.5 billion) in FY 2023–24 (Moneycontrol). This means that if even just the profits of Tata Motors alone were redirected toward public infrastructure like the Delhi Metro, India could build debt-free metro networks across cities while simultaneously easing road congestion. And remember, Tata Motors is only one arm of the Tata empire. The consolidated profits of all Tata Group companies are far greater, meaning the potential reinvestment into public goods could be transformative—if only the system were designed to prioritize collective welfare over private accumulation.

Moreover, if the Tatas continue to donate less than 0.5% of their corpus each year while simultaneously receiving steady dividends, they would never truly give away their corpus—not even in a thousand years. Instead, the wealth would perpetually accumulate, while only symbolic fractions are redistributed.

The State Couldn’t Care Less

Another case: BSNL, India’s state-owned telecom operator, was found by the Comptroller and Auditor General (CAG) to have failed to bill Reliance Jio for shared passive infrastructure from 2014 to 2024, costing the government ₹1,757 crore (~$200.0 million) + plus interest (The Economic Times, Moneylife).

This isn’t mere incompetence. When institutions controlled by the state lapse on enforcing such contracts, they effectively transfer value to powerful private players. Jio, dominant in telecom, benefits. And when the audit draws attention, BSNL responds by challenging the findings, claiming the loss is overstated (Business Today). Meanwhile, public funds remain uncollected.

Why does this matter? Because it signals that when the public institution fails, capital wins. POSIWID again: it’s not that the system failed by accident; it’s that the failure compensates powerful interests perfectly.

POSIWID as a Call to See the System for What It Is

When systems exhibit consistent failure, especially where the failures benefit the wealthy or entrenched capital groups, it’s not enough to call for efficiency fixes. POSIWID invites something more radical: to question the purpose.

If education systems are chronically underfunded and mismanaged, who benefits? Private schools, ed-tech startups, tutoring conglomerates.

If public healthcare collapses under pressure, who gains? Private hospitals, pharmaceuticals, insurers.

If transportation is unreliable, who profits? Ride-hail apps, logistics moguls, highway toll contractors, and now, even Uber is stepping into the public transit arena. The company recently introduced a “Route Share” feature, basically “Innovating so hard that they re-invented the bus!” and that, too—ONCE AGAIN! This is a service that operates on fixed routes with pickups every 20 minutes, accommodating multiple passengers and costing hefty amount, enough to fill in the pockets of the “Stakeholders” while solving a problem for the commuters that companies like Uber created themselves (Metro UK, Guardian).

The key insight: we must study the patterns of failure, not just the failures themselves. Because what a system repeatedly does—it does on purpose.

Let’s Decode the Hidden Purpose: Dysfunction Is Design, Not Defect

I don’t want to be the person, who just points out a problem, but I’d contribute my part in brainstorming by proposing some very preliminary solutions to this problem where the capitalistic entities are draining all our resources and degrading the public facilities to exercise complete control over our lives. So how do we achieve a world where systems serve true public interest?

First of all, since the system is working exactly as it is intended to, we cannot “fix” it, because fixation or improvement assumes that it is somehow failing at its stated purpose. In truth, it is succeeding all too well at serving the interests of those it was designed to serve—the wealthy, the corporations, and the political elites aligned with them. What we need, then, is not an improved or a fixed version of the same machinery, but an entirely new system: one that does not masquerade as public-minded while funneling wealth upward. This means confronting the uncomfortable reality that voting, while symbolically powerful, rarely shifts outcomes in any fundamental way, since it remains part of the very architecture that sustains inequality.

To break from this cycle, we need a radical rethinking of purpose: philanthropy must be recognized not as benevolence but as redistribution, and it must be transparent about how much of the corpus is actually disbursed versus hoarded. Public profits must be reinvested in the collective—into healthcare, schools, transport—rather than drained into the luxuries of a few. We must also dismantle the deeply embedded ideology that private control is inherently more efficient, when in fact its efficiency depends on the engineered failure of public services. And finally, instead of clinging to institutions that consistently betray their promises, we must create new systems defined by their outcomes, not by their rhetoric—systems that measure success by how the underserved live, not by how the powerful thrive. Only then can we move beyond tinkering with dysfunction and begin the harder, but necessary, work of systemic transformation.

We live in a world built on carefully calibrated failure. The kind that maintains inequality, masks public investment, funnels value to capital, while branding itself as benevolence. POSIWID teaches that the real purpose of our systems is in what they do, not what they say.

If we want change, we should stop diagnosing dysfunction. Instead, we should ask: whose interests are served by that dysfunction? And then rebuild systems where the purpose is not private interests but collective good.