KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS 9. Water Secure Kerala Adoor in summer, the wells dropping. The behaviours that refill an aquifer are individual, invisible, and slow, exactly the kind the engine accelerates, and exactly the kind the persistence check protects. Every March in my own panchayat near Adoor, my grandmother used to lower the bucket a little further into the well, and a little further, until by April it came up half full of mud. She knew exactly what would have helped, the recharge pit the agriculture officer had described, the check-dam upstream that no one maintained, but she also knew that the family who dug a pit got nothing for it, and the pit that silted up unnoticed by June was no better than no pit at all. This chapter is about her well, and the ten thousand wells like it. The fixes for Kerala’s summer thirst are known and even subsidised. What is missing is any way to reward the household that builds the pit and, just as importantly, to check a year later that the pit is still doing its work. 139