Kerala Rising: From Exporting People to Exporting Ideas · Page 10 of 353

KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS

KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS
AT A
GLANCE
Only whether to authorise a small, bounded,
The decision fully reversible pilot to find out whether it
works. Nothing larger, and nothing irreversible.
Exhibit 1 – The whole decision on one screen; the sections below give the
reasoning behind each line.
The prize
Once in a generation, a government gets the chance
to do something its successors cannot undo and its
people do not forget. This state has done it before.
One administration made it the first place of its kind
to teach its whole population to read. Another
handed real power and money to its village councils.
Another built health and welfare that far richer
places came to study. None of these is remembered
as a scheme or a budget line. Each is remembered
as a moment when the state decided what kind of
society it would be, and the leaders who presided
over those moments are remembered with them.
The prize here is of that order. It is the chance to
make this state visibly cleaner, safer, healthier, and
prouder within a single term, and to do so in a way
that becomes a model others copy, so that the state
is once again the place the country, and beyond it
the world, comes to study. The means is new and the
cost is surprisingly small, but the shape of the
opportunity is one this state has recognised and
seized three times before. The question this brief
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