KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS larger is risked. But it is an assumption, and you should know it is the one on which everything else depends. The rest of the risks, that rewards might favour the better-off, that privacy must be protected, that the institution must outlast your own term, are real but well understood, and the book sets out a specific answer to each. This is a serious idea with a serious downside named honestly, not a promise dressed up as a certainty. What you would be deciding Not whether to adopt this. Not whether to fund it in full. Not whether to stake your government on it. Only whether it is worth finding out, through a small, bounded, fully reversible first step, whether something this state could be proud of is within reach. That is the entire decision in front of you at this stage, and it is a modest one. Everything larger waits behind evidence you do not yet have and would not be asked to commit to until you did. How this might be remembered It is worth allowing yourself, for a moment, the long view, because decisions of this kind are judged by it in the end. The administrations that made this state literate, that handed power to its village councils, that built its public health, were not certain at the time that they were doing anything historic. They were solving the problem in front of them. History 13