KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS The behaviour we want to make ordinary Kerala receives heavy monsoon rain and still runs short in summer, because the water leaves as fast as it arrives. Rainwater harvesting, leak repair, pond and well rejuvenation, and household conservation are known, subsidised, well-understood fixes. They are also individual, invisible, and unrewarded, so they happen at the rate of personal virtue rather than at population scale. Water conservation is a textbook S-curve candidate. The capacity already exists: the techniques, the subsidies, the masons who can build a recharge pit. The missing piece is a loop that makes a household’s contribution visible and competed-over at neighbourhood scale, and that keeps rewarding the asset for staying functional rather than rewarding the photograph of the day it was dug. The seasonality is what makes the persistence problem acute and the loop valuable. A recharge pit dug in June, when the rain is falling and water is the last thing on anyone’s mind, has to still be functioning the following March, when it matters, for it to have done any good. Conventional schemes pay at the moment of building and never return, so a meaningful share of assets silently fail between the monsoon that built them and the summer that needed them. A loop that rewards the dry-season survival of the asset, not its construction, is aimed 140